The purpose of this paper is to present a new deterministic metaheuristic based on a modification of Variable Neighborhood Search of Mladenovic and Hansen (1997) for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Results are reported for the standard 100, 200 and 400 customer data sets by Solomon (1987) and Gehring and Homberger (1999) and two real-life problems by Russell (1995) . The findings indicate that the proposed procedure outperforms other recent local searches and metaheuristics. In addition four new best-known solutions were obtained. The proposed procedure is based on a new four-phase approach. In this approach an initial solution is first created using new route construction heuristics followed by route elimination procedure to improve the solutions regarding the number of vehicles. In the third phase the solutions are improved in terms of total traveled distance using four new local search procedures proposed in this paper. Finally in phase four the best solution obtained is improved by modifying the objective function to escape from a local minimum.
REF proposes a four-phase approach based on VND for VRPTW.
A reactive variable neighborhood search for the vehicle routing problem with time windows
INFORMS Journal on Computing
Computer Science Mathematics