A reactive tabu search meta-heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with back-hauls

Abstract

SUMMARYThe vehicle routing problem with back-hauls involves the design of a set of minimum cost routes, originating and terminating at a central depot, for a set of vehicles to service a set of customers with known quantities to be either delivered or collected. This paper describes two route-construction heuristics that generate initial solutions quickly. These heuristics are based on the saving-insertion and saving-assignment procedures, respectively. The initial solutions are then improved by a reactive tabu search meta-heuristic. The reactive concept is used in a new way to trigger the switch between di erent neighbourhood structures for the intensiÿcation and diversiÿcation phases of the search. Special data structures are also used to manage e ciently the search of the neighbourhood space. Computational results are reported for a number of benchmarks. The results show that the proposed meta-heuristic is robust and competitive to the best approaches in the literature.

A deterministic annealing algorithm for the pre- and end-haulage of intermodal container terminals

“…Similar to the COMBINE operator, this operator also impacts the number of trucks used and consequently the fixed vehicle costs in the objective function. These neighbourhood mechanisms are subsets of the general λ-interchange mechanism, described by Osman and Wassan (2002). The CROSS operator is an example of a 1-interchange mechanism, which involves only a single customer of each route.…”

Heuristic algorithms for a vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup and time windows in home health care

“…Exact methods for the VRPB are proposed by (Yano, et al, 1987) (P. Toth and Vigo, 1997a) (Mingozzi, et al, 1999). Heuristics have been developed by (Goetschalckx and Jacobs-Blecha, 1989) (Paolo Toth and Vigo, 1999) (Osman and Wassan, 2002) (Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, et al, 2006) (Y Gajpal and PL Abad, 2009). If the linehaul and backhaul customers can be freely mixed within a route, the VRPB is transformed to the vehicle routing problem with mixed backhauls (VRPMB).…”

Reactive Search Optimization: Learning While Optimizing

“…A reactive tabu search version for the vehicle routing problem with time windows is designed in [44], while a version of the vehicle routing problem with back-hauls is considered in [50] and [104]. A Reactive Variable Neighborhood Search for the Vehicle-Routing Problem with Time Windows is proposed in [35].…”