VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEMS VIA TABU SEARCH METAHEURISTIC

This paper addresses the application of the Tabu Search technique to the vehicle routing problem with time windows constraints. A simple adaptation of Tabu Search which uses only a short term memory strategy to overcome local optimality is developed. At first, an initial solution is obtained by a sequential route construction algorithm. After that, an arc interchange improving procedure is applied using as move attributes the deleted edges and the added edges. A sensitivity analysis is carried out in order to establish good choices for the number of edges considered tabu in a movement and for the lengths of the tabu lists. The method is tested on a large set of randomly generated routing problems and on a set of classical test problems. (A)