Enhanced guided ejection search for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows

Abstract

This paper presents an enhanced guided ejection search (GES) to minimize the number of vehicles in the NP-hard pickup and delivery problem with time windows. The proposed improvements decrease the convergence time of the GES, and boost the quality of results. Extensive experimental study on the benchmark set shows how the enhancements influence the GES capabilities. It is coupled with the statistical tests to verify the significance of the results. We give a guidance on how to select a proper algorithm variant based on test characteristics and objectives. We report one new world’s best result obtained using the enhanced GES.