High‐Level Relay Hybrid Metaheuristic Method for Multi‐Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper presents an efficient hybrid metaheuristic solution for multi‐depot vehicle routing with time windows (MD‐VRPTW). MD‐VRPTW involves the routing of a set of vehicles with limited capacity from a set of depots to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands and predefined time windows. The present work aims at using a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm in the class of High‐Level Relay Hybrid (HRH) which works in three levels and uses an efficient genetic algorithm as the main optimization algorithm and tabu search as an improvement method. In the genetic algorithm various heuristics incorporate local exploitation in the evolutionary search. An operator deletion‐ retrieval strategy is executed which shows the efficiency of the inner working of the proposed method. The proposed algorithm is applied to solve the problems of the standard Cordeau’s Instances. Results show that proposed approach is quite effective, as it provides solutions that are competitive with the best known in the literature.