Clarke Wright Performance Benchmarks

The problem instance data

The problem instances we are basing our measurements on are provided courtesy of CVRPLIB and can be divided into five groups¹ of different characteristics:

• Augerat A, 1995 (27 instances)

• Augerat B, 1995 (23 instances)

• Christofides and Eilon, 1969 (13 instances)

• Fisher, 1994 (3 instances)

• Rochat and Taillard, 1995 (12 instances)

The data provides the problem instance as well as the optimal solution.

Relation to optimal and trivial solution

The idea of this indicator is to measure where the Clarke-Wright solution sits in between the optimal solution and the trivial solution². Let \(\gamma\) be the cost of the Clarke-Wright solution, \(\omega\) the cost of the optimal solution, and \(\alpha\) the cost of the trivial solution. The measure \(\xi\) is defined to be \[\xi := 1 - \frac{\gamma - \omega}{\alpha - \omega}\,.\] The measure can move between zero and 1. It is zero if the solution is the trivial solution, and it is one if the solution is the optimal solution.

Evaluating this for CVRPLIB sample data yields the following graph.

The mean value over all problem instances is \(\overline{\xi}=96.7\%\).

Relative deviation of optimal solution

We can also simply measure the relative deviation of the Clarke-Wright cost to the optimal cost, \[\rho := \frac{\gamma - \omega}{\gamma}\,,\] which measures how much savings we miss by using the Clarke-Wright solution instead of the optimal solution.

The mean value over all problem instances is \(\overline{\rho}=11\%\), i.e. on average, we miss out on around \(11\%\) savings taking the Clarke-Wright solution compared to the optimal one.