Improving the Approximation Ratio for Capacitated Vehicle Routing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new approximation algorithm for capacitated vehicle routing that improves upon classical methods, achieving better approximation ratios across various cases in arbitrary metric spaces.

Contribution

The paper presents the first improvement over classical tour partitioning algorithms for capacitated vehicle routing in arbitrary metric spaces.

Findings

Achieves better approximation ratios for general capacitated vehicle routing.

Improves results for unit-demand and splittable variants.

Applicable in arbitrary metric spaces.

Abstract

We devise a new approximation algorithm for capacitated vehicle routing. Our algorithm yields a better approximation ratio for general capacitated vehicle routing as well as for the unit-demand case and the splittable variant. Our results hold in arbitrary metric spaces. This is the first improvement upon the classical tour partitioning algorithm by Haimovich and Rinnooy Kan and Altinkemer and Gavish.