Path relinking for the vehicle routing problem

This paper descibes a tabu search heuristic with path relinking for the vehicle routing problem. Tabu search is a local search method that explores the solution space more thoroughly than other local search based methods by overcoming local optima. Path relinking is a method to integrate intensification and diversification in the search. It explores paths that connect previously found elite solutions. Computational results show that tabu search with path relinking is superior to pure tabu search on the vehicle routing problem.