Robust Feasible Route Construction through Collaborative Partition Optimization

Abstract

Large-scale Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRPs) are commonly solved by partitioning customers into smaller routing problems that can be optimized independently. While this substantially reduces computational complexity, independently constructed routing solutions may leave some customer demand unserved even when sufficient resources exist elsewhere in the fleet. We present Collaborative Routing Constructors (CoRC), a routing framework that enables independently solved subproblems to exchange customers and vehicles during optimization rather than relying solely on a fixed partition or a subsequent global re-optimization stage. Computational experiments on AGS benchmark instances and synthetic instances containing up to 200,000 customers compare CoRC against independent routing, post-routing global re-optimization, and state-of-the-art, end-to-end routing frameworks. Across all evaluated partitioning strategies, CoRC consistently constructs feasible routing solutions where competing partition-based methods do not. Furthermore, it remains effective on problem instances for which the evaluated end-to-end routing frameworks did not produce solutions under the same computational budget. These results demonstrate that collaboration between routing subproblems provides a robust and scalable approach for feasible large-scale route construction.