Article ID: | iaor20062644 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 56 |
Issue: | 8 |
Start Page Number: | 954 |
End Page Number: | 961 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2005 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | ncan T., Altnel .K. |
In this work we are concerned with the Clarke–Wright savings method for the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem. This is an NP-hard problem and numerous heuristic solution methods have been proposed. They can be classified as the classical ones and metaheuristics. Recent developments have shown that classical heuristics do not compare with the best metaheuristic implementations. However, some of them are very fast and simple to implement. This explains the popularity of the Clarke–Wright savings method in practice and the motivation behind its enhancements. We follow this line of research and propose a new enhancement which differs from the previous ones in its saving criterion: Customer demands are considered in addition to distances. Based on the extensive computational experiments we can say that the new method is not only very fast but also very accurate.