The purpose of this paper is to describe TABUROUTE, a new tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with capacity and route length restrictions. The algorithm considers a sequence of adjacent solutions obtained by repeatedly removing a vertex from its current route, and reinserting it into another route. This is done by means of a generalized insertion procedure previously developed by the authors. During the course of the algorithm, infeasible solutions are allowed. Numerical tests on a set of benchmark problems indicate that tabu search outperforms the best existing heuristics, and TABUROUTE often produces the bes known solutions. (A)

A tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem

The purpose of this paper is to describe TABUROUTE, a new tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with capacity and route length restrictions. The algorithm considers a sequence of adjacent solutions obtained by repeatedly removing a vertex from its current route and reinserting it into another route. This is done by means of a generalized insertion procedure previously developed by the authors. During the course of the algorithm, infeasible solutions are allowed. Numerical tests on a set of benchmark problems indicate that tabu search out performs the best existing heuristics, and TABUROUTE often produces the best known solutions.

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Persistent UAV delivery logistics: MILP formulation and efficient heuristic

The article addresses the well-known Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), in the special case where the demand of a customer consists of a certain number of two-dimensional weighted items. The problem calls for the minimization of the cost of transportation needed for the delivery of the goods demanded by the customers, and carried out by a fleet of vehicles based at a central depot. In order to accommodate all items on the vehicles, a feasibility check of the two-dimensional packing (2L) must be executed on each vehicle. The overall problem, denoted as 2L-CVRP, is NP-hard and particularly difficult to solve in practice. We propose a Tabu Search algorithm, in which the loading component of the problem is solved through heuristics, lower bounds and a truncated branch-and-bound procedure. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive computational experiments.

Tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with two dimensional loading constraints

On the integer properties of scheduling set partitioning models

A heuristic method is used to solve the vehicle scheduling problem by maintaining local optimality whilst approaching the feasible region. Tests with published problems show that the technique gives results comparable with the best published algorithms. The practical requirements of real life scheduling are discussed, and the flexibility of the technique is demonstrated for a complex problem involving weekly cyclical deliveries.

I. M. Cheshire

Papers

A Dual Heuristic for Vehicle Scheduling