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HICSS
2005
IEEE

A Two-Stage Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and a Limited Number of Vehicles

13 years 9 months ago
A Two-Stage Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and a Limited Number of Vehicles
The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is an important problem in logistics. The problem is to serve a number of customers at minimum cost without violating the customers’ time window constraints and the vehicle capacity constraint. The m-VRPTW is a variant of the VRPTW in which a limited number of vehicles is available. A feasible solution to m-VRPTW may contain some unserved customers due to the insufficiency of vehicles. The primary objective of m-VRPTW is to maximize the number of customers served. In this paper, we propose a two-stage algorithm for the m-VRPTW. The algorithm first maximizes the number of customers served with an Ejection Pool to hold temporarily unserved customers. Then it minimizes the total travel distance using a multi-start iterated hill-climbing algorithm with classical and new operators including Generalized Ejection Chains. The experimental results showed consistently good performance of the algorithm when compared with other methods.
Andrew Lim, Xingwen Zhang
Added 24 Jun 2010
Updated 24 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2005
Where HICSS
Authors Andrew Lim, Xingwen Zhang
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