Title: Heuristic, Exact and Hybrid Methods for the Multi- Pile Vehicle Routing Problem Authors: Fabien Tricoire (1), Karl F. Doerner (1), Richard F. Hartl (1), Manuel Iori (2) (1) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria (2) DISMI, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy Abstract: The Multi-Pile Vehicle Routing Problem is a particular combination of packing and routing problems, in which items have to be loaded into different piles within vehicles, and then delivered with minimum cost. The problem is motivated by a real-world timber distribution problem, and is of both theoretical and practical interest. In this work we first develop heuristic and exact methods to solve the loading problem. We then include these methods into a tailored combination of Variable Neighborhood Search and Branch-and-Cut, to solve the overall problem. Extensive computational results shows how the resulting algorithms are capable of solving to optimality a large number of small-size instances, and of consistently outperforming previous algorithms from the literature on large-size and real-world instances.