A new tabu search heuristic for the open vehicle routing problem

A unified tabu search algorithm for vehicle routing problems with soft time windows

“…With respect to the TS metaheuristic for the VRP, some researchers, such as Van Breedam (2001) and Brandão (2004), claimed that the performance of the TS heuristic was highly dependent on the quality of the initial solutions. However, in our previous work (Fu et al, 2005), it was shown that the initial solution did not have a large influence on the final solutions in the proposed TS heuristic. In this paper, therefore, the initial solution is generated by building up successive routes where the next customer is chosen at random and added to the end of the route unless this violates the capacity or route length constraints; in that case the route is completed back to the depot and a new route starts.…”

“…We developed an effective TS heuristic for the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) in a previous work (Fu et al, 2005(Fu et al, , 2006. The full details of the algorithm were given in the referenced paper and so only the outline of the algorithm and the changes that have been made to apply it to the VRPSTW are described here.…”

“…Some discussion of different neighbourhood structures for VRP was presented in Fu et al (2005), including proposals from Pureza and França (1991), Osman (1993), Gendreau et al (1994), Duhamel et al (1997), Cordeau et al (2001), Brandão (2004) and Taillard et al (1997).…”

A branch-and-cut algorithm for the capacitated open vehicle routing problem

“…The last two columns give the lower bound and time for the closed version of the instance. Fu, Eglese and Li (2005). This was due to a bug in the code, which has been corrected.…”

“…Two further areas of application are described by Fu et al (2005). The first involves the planning of train services, starting or ending at the Channel Tunnel.…”