A route-neighborhood-based metaheuristic for vehicle routing problem with time windows

In this paper, a two-stage metaheuristic based on a new neighborhood structure is proposed to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Our neighborhood construction focuses on the relationship between route(s) and node(s). Unlike the conventional methods for parallel route construction, we construct routes in a nested parallel manner to obtain higher solution quality. Valuable information extracted from the previous parallel construction runs is used to enhance the performance of parallel construction. In addition, when there are only a few unrouted customers left, we design a special procedure for handling them. Computational results for 60 benchmark problems are reported. The results indicate that our approach is highly competitive with all existing heuristics, and in particular very promising for solving problems of large size.