Tabu search variants for the mix fleet vehicle routing problem

N A Wassan () and I H Osman
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N A Wassan: University of Kent at Canterbury
I H Osman: American University of Beirut

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2002, vol. 53, issue 7, 768-782

Abstract: Abstract The Mix Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (MFVRP) involves the design of a set of minimum cost routes, originating and terminating at a central depot, for a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles with various capacities, fixed costs and variable costs to service a set of customers with known demands. This paper develops new variants of a tabu search meta-heuristic for the MFVRP. These variants use a mix of different components, including reactive tabu search concepts; variable neighbourhoods, special data memory structures and hashing functions. The reactive concept is used in a new way to trigger the switch between simple moves for intensification and more complex ones for diversification of the search strategies. The special data structures are newly introduced to efficiently search the various neighbourhood spaces. The combination of data structures and strategic balance between intensification and diversification generates an efficient and robust implementation, which is very competitive with other algorithms in the literature on a set of benchmark instances for which some new best-known solutions are provided.

Keywords: mix fleet vehicle routing problem; heterogeneous fleet; vehicle routing; local search; heuristics; meta-heuristics; tabu search; variable neighbourhood search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601344

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