Article ID: | iaor20082531 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 58 |
Issue: | 9 |
Start Page Number: | 1223 |
End Page Number: | 1234 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Aras N., Aksen D., zyurt Z. |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
In this paper, we consider a variant of the open vehicle routing problem in which vehicles depart from the depot, visit a set of customers, and end their routes at special nodes called driver nodes. A driver node can be the home of the driver or a parking lot where the vehicle will stay overnight. The resulting problem is referred to as the open vehicle routing problem with driver nodes (OYRP-d). We consider three classes of OYRP-d: with no time constraints, with a maximum route duration, and with both a maximum route duration as well as time deadlines for visiting customers. For the solution of these problems, which are not addressed previously in the literature, we develop a new tabu search heuristic. Computational results on randomly generated instances indicate that the new heuristic exhibits a good performance both in terms of the solution quality and computation time.