Article ID: | iaor20071813 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 57 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 111 |
End Page Number: | 116 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2006 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Wassan N.A. |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
The classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) involves determining a fleet of homogeneous size vehicles and designing an associated set of routes that minimizes the total cost. Our tabu search (TS) algorithm to solve the VRP is based on reactive tabu search (RTS) with a new escape mechanism, which manipulates different neighbourhood schemes in a very sophisticated way in order to get a balanced intensification and diversification continuously during the search process. We compare our algorithm with the best methods in the literature using different data sets and report results including new best known solutions for several well-known benchmark problems.