A tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and split deliveries

The routing of a fleet of vehicles to service a set of customers is important in the field of distribution. Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) arise in many real-life applications within transportation and logistics. In this paper, we study a variant of the basic VRP, VRP with Time Windows and Split Deliveries (VRPTWSD). Time constrained routing is relevant for applications where a schedule has to be followed, e.g. school bus routing and postal deliveries. The option of splitting a demand makes it possible to service a customer whose demand exceeds the vehicle capacity. Splitting also allows to decrease costs. A lot has been done within VRP with Time Windows (VRPTW) (see e.g. Cordeau et al. [1]), while the concept of split delivery routing is fairly new. Dror and Trudeau published the first paper on this topic in 1989 (see Dror and Trudeau [2]). Although VRPTWSD is a relaxation of the VRPTW, the problem does not become easier to solve, and is still NP-hard. In this work, we propose a solu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: COR
• Authors: Sin C. Ho, Dag Haugland
• Keywords: COR 2004, Customer, Routing, Vehicle