Solving real-life vehicle routing problems efficiently using tabu search

This paper presents a tabu search based method for finding good solutions to a real-life vehicle routing problem. The problem considered deals with some new features beyond those normally associated with the classical problems of the literature: in addition to capacity constraints for vehicles and time windows for deliveries, it takes the heterogeneous character of the fleet into account, in the sense that utilization costs are vehicle-dependent and that some accessibility restrictions have to fulfilled. It also deals with the use of trailers. In spite of the intricacy of the problem, the proposed tabu search approach is easy to implement and can be easily adapted to many other applications. An emphasis is placed on means that have to be used to speed up the search. In a few minutes of computation on a personal workstation, the present approach obtains solutions that are significantly better than those previously developed and implemented in practice.