Minimax optimisation approach for the Robust Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and uncertain travel times

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Robust Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (RVRPTW). The objective is to find a robust solution that has the best worst-case performance This paper proposes a two-phase algorithm to solve a minimax optimisation problem with uncertain travel times. The algorithm includes the Modified Push-Forward Insertion Heuristic (MPFIH), a λ-interchange local search descent method and Tabu Search (TS). The experiments are based on a modified version of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with time windows benchmarking problem of Solomon. The results show that the two-phase algorithm can find robust solutions in all conditions.