Efficiency of strategies and exchange operations in the vehicle routing problem

In the recent years many papers have appeared which aim at heuristic solution of vehicle routing problem. Most of them reported on very sophisticated algorithms based on the simulated annealing or the tabu search principles. All the algorithms use exchange operations to move from a current solution to a next one and they employed one of the possible strategies to choose a suitable operation. This paper deals with the influence of individual strategies and parameters of exchange operations on vehicle routing problem solution. The vehicle routing problem with time windows is considered and a sequential algorithm is used to work out experiments and claim which of the strategies is the most suitable and which of parameters takes great deal on solution improvements.