The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery and handling costs

•We solve vehicle routing problems with pickup and delivery and handling costs.•We formulate a MIP model and show how to adapt it to solve related problems.•We develop an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) heuristic to solve them.•We propose and test new policies for the handling decisions.•We test our ALNS on benchmark instances for problems from the literature.•We compare solutions from the MIP and the ALNS for newly introduced problems.