Local Optima Network Analysis of Multi-attribute Vehicle Routing Problem

Multi-Attribute Vehicle Routing Problems (MAVRP) are variants of Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) in which, besides the original constraint on vehicle capacity present in Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), there are other restrictions that model diverse real-life system attributes. Among the most common attributes studied in the literature are the vehicle capacity and the maximum route length constraints. The impact of these restrictions on the overall structure of the problem and on the performance of local search algorithms used to solve it is not well known. This paper aims to explain how constraints impact different variants of VRP by altering the structure of the underlying search space. We focus on the analysis of Local Optima Networks (LON) for multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (m-TSP), and VRP with capacity (CVRP), distance (DVRP), and both (DCVRP) constraints. We present results that indicate that metrics obtained for a sample of local optima provide valuable information on the behavior of the landscape under modifications in the constraints of the problem. 
The dataset contains the data extracted from the local optima network for a set of variants belonging to the family of vehicle routing problems.