Cordeau, J.-F.; Laporte, G.; Mercier, A. A unified tabu search heuristic for vehicle routing problems with time windows. (English) Zbl 1181.90034 J. Oper. Res. Soc. 52, No. 8, 928-936 (2001). Summary: This paper presents a unified tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and for two important generalizations: the periodic and the multi-depot vehicle routing problems with time windows. The major benefits of the approach are its speed, simplicity and flexibility. The performance of the heuristic is assessed by comparing it to alternative methods on benchmark instances of the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Computational experiments are also reported on new randomly generated instances for each of the two generalizations. Cited in 140 Documents MSC: 90B06 Transportation, logistics and supply chain management 90B10 Deterministic network models in operations research 90C59 Approximation methods and heuristics in mathematical programming Keywords:vehicle routing problem; periodic vehicle routing problem; multi-depot vehicle routing problem; time windows; tabu search PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{J. F. Cordeau} et al., J. Oper. Res. Soc. 52, No. 8, 928--936 (2001; Zbl 1181.90034) Full Text: DOI