  We consider a family of Rich Vehicle Routing Problems (RVRP) which have the
particularity to combine a heterogeneous fleet with other attributes, such as
backhauls, multiple depots, split deliveries, site dependency, open routes,
duration limits, and time windows. To efficiently solve these problems, we
propose a hybrid metaheuristic which combines an iterated local search with
variable neighborhood descent, for solution improvement, and a set partitioning
formulation, to exploit the memory of the past search. Moreover, we investigate
a class of combined neighborhoods which jointly modify the sequences of visits
and perform either heuristic or optimal reassignments of vehicles to routes. To
the best of our knowledge, this is the first unified approach for a large class
of heterogeneous fleet RVRPs, capable of solving more than 12 problem variants.
The efficiency of the algorithm is evaluated on 643 well-known benchmark
instances, and 71.70\% of the best known solutions are either retrieved or
improved. Moreover, the proposed metaheuristic, which can be considered as a
matheuristic, produces high quality solutions with low standard deviation in
comparison with previous methods. Finally, we observe that the use of combined
neighborhoods does not lead to significant quality gains. Contrary to
intuition, the computational effort seems better spent on more intensive route
optimization rather than on more intelligent and frequent fleet re-assignments.
