Variable-depth search for the single-vehicle pickup and delivery problem with time windows

Variable-depth search for the single-vehicle pickup and delivery problem with time windows

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Article ID: iaor1995205
Country: United States
Volume: 27
Issue: 3
Start Page Number: 298
End Page Number: 311
Publication Date: Aug 1993
Journal: Transportation Science
Authors: , ,
Keywords: vehicle routing & scheduling
Abstract:

The authors consider a single depot and a set of customers with known demands, each of which must be picked up and delivered at specified locations and within given time windows. They seek a route and a schedule for a single vehicle with known capacity, which minimizes the route duration, i.e., the difference between the arrival time and the departure time at the depot. The authors develop a local search method for this problem based on a variable-depth search, similar to the Lin-Kernighan algorithm for the traveling salesman problem. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase, a feasible route is constructed; in the second phase, it is iteratively improved. In both phases, the authors use a variable-depth search built up out of seven basic types of arc-exchange procedures. When tested on real-life problems, the method is shown to produce near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time. In spite of this, there is the theoretical possibility that the method may end up with a poor or even infeasible solution. As a safeguard against such an emergency, the authors have developed an alternative algorithm based on simulated annealing. As a rule, it finds high quality solutions in a relatively large computation time.

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