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A unified tabu search heuristic for vehicle routing problems with time windows. (English) Zbl 1181.90034

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.

MSC:

90B06 Transportation, logistics and supply chain management
90B10 Deterministic network models in operations research
90C59 Approximation methods and heuristics in mathematical programming
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