The pickup and delivery problem with time windows is the problem of serving a number of transportation requests using a limited amount of vehicles. Each request involves moving a number of goods from a pickup location to a delivery location. Our task is to construct routes that visit all locations such that corresponding pickups and deliveries are placed on the same route, and such that a pickup is performed before the corresponding delivery. The routes must also satisfy time window and capacity constraints.

This paper presents a heuristic for the problem based on an extension of the large neighborhood search heuristic previously suggested for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The proposed heuristic is composed of a number of competing subheuristics that are used with a frequency corresponding to their historic performance. This general framework is denoted adaptive large neighborhood search.

The heuristic is tested on more than 350 benchmark instances with up to 500 requests. It is able to improve the best known solutions from the literature for more than 50% of the problems.

The computational experiments indicate that it is advantageous to use several competing subheuristics instead of just one. We believe that the proposed heuristic is very robust and is able to adapt to various instance characteristics.

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An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics.

The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area.

The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas.

The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming.

- Covers the whole field of constraint programming
- Survey-style chapters
- Five chapters on applications

Table of Contents

Foreword (Ugo Montanari) 
Part I : Foundations
Chapter 1. Introduction (Francesca Rossi, Peter van Beek, Toby Walsh) 
Chapter 2. Constraint Satisfaction: An Emerging Paradigm (Eugene C. Freuder, Alan K. Mackworth) 
Chapter 3. Constraint Propagation (Christian Bessiere) 
Chapter 4. Backtracking Search Algorithms (Peter van Beek) 
Chapter 5. Local Search Methods (Holger H. Hoos, Edward Tsang) 
Chapter 6. Global Constraints (Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Irit Katriel)
Chapter 7. Tractable Structures for CSPs (Rina Dechter)
Chapter 8. The Complexity of Constraint Languages
(David Cohen, Peter Jeavons) 
Chapter 9. Soft Constraints (Pedro Meseguer, Francesca Rossi, Thomas Schiex) 
Chapter 10. Symmetry in Constraint Programming
(Ian P. Gent, Karen E. Petrie, Jean-Francois Puget)
Chapter 11. Modelling (Barbara M. Smith) 
Part II : Extensions, Languages, and Applications

Chapter 12. Constraint Logic Programming (Kim Marriott, Peter J. Stuckey, Mark Wallace) 
Chapter 13. Constraints in Procedural and Concurrent Languages (Thom Fruehwirth, Laurent Michel, Christian Schulte)
Chapter 14. Finite Domain Constraint Programming Systems (Christian Schulte, Mats Carlsson) 
Chapter 15. Operations Research Methods in Constraint Programming (John Hooker) 
Chapter 16. Continuous and Interval Constraints(Frederic Benhamou, Laurent Granvilliers) 
Chapter 17. Constraints over Structured Domains
(Carmen Gervet) 
Chapter 18. Randomness and Structure (Carla Gomes, Toby Walsh)
Chapter 19. Temporal CSPs (Manolis Koubarakis)
Chapter 20. Distributed Constraint Programming
(Boi Faltings) 
Chapter 21. Uncertainty and Change (Kenneth N. Brown, Ian Miguel)
Chapter 22. Constraint-Based Scheduling and Planning
(Philippe Baptiste, Philippe Laborie, Claude Le Pape, Wim Nuijten)
Chapter 23. Vehicle Routing (Philip Kilby, Paul Shaw) 
Chapter 24. Configuration (Ulrich Junker)
Chapter 25. Constraint Applications in Networks
(Helmut Simonis)
Chapter 26. Bioinformatics and Constraints (Rolf Backofen, David Gilbert)

/pdf/handbook-of-constraint-programming-53srutguo2.pdf

Handbook of Constraint Programming

Introduction to stochastic programming

https://www.mansci.ovgu.de/mansci_media/publikationen/2007/typology-EGOTEC-5t0pvr6fjifln4r4oav60tt612.pdf

An improved typology of cutting and packing problems

https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~ferland/Seminars/Local_search/Pisinger,Ropke_ALNS_2007.pdf

A general heuristic for vehicle routing problems

The problem addressed in this paper is that of orthogonally packing a given set of rectangular-shaped items into the minimum number of three-dimensional rectangular bins. The problem is strongly NP-hard and extremely difficult to solve in practice. Lower bounds are discussed, and it is proved that the asymptotic worst-case performance ratio of the continuous lower bound is ?. An exact algorithm for filling a single bin is developed, leading to the definition of an exact branch-and-bound algorithm for the three-dimensional bin packing problem, which also incorporates original approximation algorithms. Extensive computational results, involving instances with up to 90 items, are presented: It is shown that many instances can be solved to optimality within a reasonable time limit.

The Three-Dimensional Bin Packing Problem

Heuristics based on large neighborhood search have recently shown outstanding results in solving various transportation and scheduling problems. Large neighborhood search methods explore a complex neighborhood by use of heuristics. Using large neighborhoods makes it possible to find better candidate solutions in each iteration and hence traverse a more promising search path. Starting from the large neighborhood search method, we give an overview of very large scale neighborhood search methods and discuss recent variants and extensions like variable depth search and adaptive large neighborhood search.

/pdf/large-neighborhood-search-11l8tr3ez0.pdf

Large Neighborhood Search

https://orbit.dtu.dk/files/3155117/A%20unified%20heuristic%20for%20a%20large%20class%20of%20Vehicle%20Routing%20Problems%20with%20Backhauls_TechRep_Ropke_Pisinger.pdf

David Pisinger

Papers

An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows

A general heuristic for vehicle routing problems

The Three-Dimensional Bin Packing Problem

Large Neighborhood Search

A Unified Heuristic for a Large Class of Vehicle Routing Problems with Backhauls