This article systematically reviews the literature on adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) to gain insights into the operators used for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) and their effectiveness. The ALNS has been successfully applied to a variety of optimization problems, particularly variants of the VRP. The ALNS gradually improves an initial solution by modifying it using removal and insertion operators. However, relying solely on adaptive operator selection is not advisable. Instead, authors often conduct experiments to identify operators that improve the solution quality or remove detrimental ones. This process is mostly cumbersome due to the wide variety of operators, further complicated by inconsistent nomenclature. The objectives of this review are threefold: First, to classify ALNS operators using a unified terminology; second, to analyze their performance; and third, to present guidelines for the development and analysis of ALNS algorithms in the future based on the outcomes of the performance evaluation. In this review, we conduct a network meta-analysis of 211 articles published between 2006 and 2023 that have applied ALNS algorithms in the context of VRPs. We employ incomplete pairwise comparison matrices, similar to rankings used in sports, to rank the operators. We identify 57 distinct removal and 42 insertion operators, and the analysis ranks them based on their effectiveness. Sequence-based removal operators, which remove sequences of customers in the current solution, are found to be the most effective. The best-performing insertion operators are those that exhibit foresight, such as regret insertion operators. Finally, guidelines and possible future research directions are discussed.

中文翻译：

---

自适应大邻域搜索车辆路径问题中算子的回顾和排名


本文系统回顾了自适应大邻域搜索 (ALNS) 的文献，以深入了解用于车辆路径问题 (VRP) 的算子及其有效性。 ALNS 已成功应用于各种优化问题，特别是 VRP 的变体。 ALNS 通过使用删除和插入运算符修改初始解决方案，逐渐改进初始解决方案。然而，仅仅依靠自适应算子选择是不可取的。相反，作者经常进行实验来识别可以提高解决方案质量或消除有害算子的算子。由于操作员种类繁多，这个过程非常繁琐，而且术语不一致也变得更加复杂。此次审查的目标有三个：首先，使用统一的术语对 ALNS 运营商进行分类；其次，分析他们的表现；第三，根据性能评估结果提出未来 ALNS 算法开发和分析的指南。在这篇综述中，我们对 2006 年至 2023 年间发表的 211 篇文章进行了网络元分析，这些文章在 VRP 的背景下应用了 ALNS 算法。我们采用不完整的成对比较矩阵（类似于体育中使用的排名）来对运算符进行排名。我们确定了 57 个不同的删除操作符和 42 个插入操作符，并根据其有效性进行分析对它们进行排名。基于序列的删除运算符（在当前解决方案中删除客户序列）被发现是最有效的。表现最好的插入操作符是那些表现出远见的操作符，例如后悔插入操作符。最后，讨论了指导方针和未来可能的研究方向。