Article ID: | iaor20084443 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 177 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 719 |
End Page Number: | 732 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2007 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Derigs U., Kaiser R. |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search, combinatorial optimization |
The attribute based hill climber (ABHC) is a variant of the general tabu-search principle which has shown to be competitive with respect to quality as well as efficiency to other local search heuristics for the two corner stone problems in combinatorial optimization: the travelling salesman problem and the quadratic assignment problem. ABHC is completely parameter-free, and its generic logic depends on the concept of partitioning the solution space based on solution ‘attributes’, which is the problem-specific choice. In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of this concept and the efficiency of the ABHC heuristic for the general vehicle routing problem.