Combining Meta-Heuristics to Effectively Solve the Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows

The vehicle routing problemswith time windows are challenging deliveryproblems in which instances involving 100customers or more can be difficult to solve.There were many interesting heuristics proposedto handle these problems effectively. In thispaper, we examined two well-knownmeta-heuristics and carefully combined theshort-term and long-term memory-like mechanismsof both methods to achieve better results. Ourprototype was shown to compare favorablyagainst the original search methods and otherrelated search hybrids on the Solomon's testcases. More importantly, our proposal ofintegration opens up many exciting directionsfor further investigation.