The XL Instances for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

TL;DR

This paper presents a new set of large-scale benchmark instances for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, covering 1,000 to 10,000 customers, and provides initial best known solutions to facilitate future research and algorithm benchmarking.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of XL benchmark instances for CVRP, extending existing datasets and establishing a baseline for community-driven solution comparison.

Findings

New large-scale CVRP instances with 1,000 to 10,000 customers

Initial best known solutions for XL instances provided

Benchmark instances publicly available for research use

Abstract

This paper introduces a new set of large-scale benchmark instances for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). The proposed XL set extends existing benchmarks by covering instances with 1,000 to 10,000 customers and a wide range of structural characteristics, following established generation principles from prior CVRP studies. A computational study involving several state-of-the-art algorithms is conducted to provide initial best known solutions (BKSs) for the XL instances, which serve as a baseline for a community-driven BKS challenge launched on the CVRPLib website. The instances are made publicly available to support experimental evaluation and comparison of solution methods. Furthermore, additional computational analyses are reported to compare algorithmic performance on other existing CVRP benchmark instances.