An overview of a heuristic for vehicle routing problem with time windows

Abstract

In this paper, a two-stage metaheuristic based on a new neighborhood structure is proposed to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Our neighborhood construction focuses on the relationship between route(s) and node(s). Unlike the conventional methods for parallel route construction, we construct routes in a nested parallel manner to obtain higher solution quality. Computational results for 60 benchmark problems are reported. The results indicate that our approach is highly competitive with all existing heuristics, in particular very promising for solving problems with large size. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.