A Threshold Accepting Metaheuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

Threshold Accepting, a variant of Simulated Annealing, is applied for the first time to a set of 356 benchmark instances for the Vehicle Routing with Time Windows. The Threshold Accepting metaheuristic is used to improve upon results obtained with a recent parallel genetic algorithm and a multi-start local search to illustrate its value as a post-processor. The Threshold Accepting metaheuristic is shown to be a fast and versatile post- processor that can be imposed upon a variety of heuristic or metaheuristic approaches for vehicle routing to get better results in both theoretical and practical applications.