Three Strategies Tabu Search for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

In the vehicle routing problem with time window (VRPTW), the objective is to minimize the number of vehicles and then minimize the total time travelled. Each route starts at the depot and ends at a customer, visiting a number of customers, each once, en route, without returning to the depot. The demand of each customer must be completely fulfilled by a single vehicle. The total demand serviced by each vehicle must not exceed vehicle capacity. An effective tabu search for vehicle routing with time window (TSTS-VRPTW) heuristic for this problem is proposed. The TSTS-VRPTW is based on three function MOVE, EXCHANGE, SWAP. Computational results on Solomon′s benchmarks that consist of six different datasets show that the proposed TSTS-VRPTW is comparable in terms of solution quality to the best performing published heuristics.