A unified tabu search heuristic for vehicle routing problems with time windows

Abstract

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.