AASA: A Priori Adaptive Splitting Algorithm for the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem

The split delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) is a relaxed variant of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) where the restriction that each customer is visited precisely once is removed. Compared with CVRP, the SDVRP allows a reduction in the total cost of the routes traveled by vehicles. The exact methods to solve the SDVRP are computationally expensive. Moreover, the complexity and difficult implementation of the state-of-the-art heuristic approaches hinder their application in real-life scenarios of the SDVRP. In this paper, we propose an easily understandable and effective approach to solve the SDVPR based on an a priori adaptive splitting algorithm (AASA) that improves the existing state of the art on a priori split strategy in terms of both solution accuracy and time complexity. In this approach, the demand of the customers is split into smaller demand values using a splitting rule in advance. Consequently, the original SDVRP instance is converted to a CVRP instance which is solved using an existing CVRP solver. While the proposed a priori splitting rule in the literature is fixed for all customers regardless of their demand and location, we suggest an adaptive splitting rule that takes into account the distance of the customers to the depot and their demand values. Our experiments show that AASA can generate solutions comparable to the state of the art, but much faster.