Parallel tabu search for a pickup and delivery problem under track contention

This article introduces the Pickup and Delivery Problem under Track Contention, a particular vehicle routing problem in which loads have to be transported between origin–destination pairs by means of vehicles travelling along a capacitated network. Two sequential heuristics and a parallel tabu search are proposed. Computational experiments show that the parallel tabu search is able to find much better solutions than the sequential procedures, although this comes at the expense of a higher computing time.