Article ID: | iaor20023248 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 8 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 43 |
End Page Number: | 58 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2002 |
Journal: | Journal of Heuristics |
Authors: | Gendreau Michel, Pesant Gilles, Rousseau Louis-Martin |
Keywords: | constraint handling languages |
This paper presents operators searching large neighborhoods in order to solve the vehicle routing problem. They make use of the pruning and propagation techniques of constraint programming which allow an efficient search of such neighborhoods. The advantages of using a large neighborhood are not only the increased probability of finding a better solution at each iteration but also the reduction of the need to invoke specially-designed methods to avoid local minima. These operators are combined in a variable neighborhood descent in order to take advantage of the different neighborhood structures they generate.