Variable Neighborhood Search for Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Time Windows

Abstract : The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with Multiple Time Windows is a generalization of VRP, where the customers have one or more time windows in which they can be visited. The best heuristic in the literature is a Hybrid Variable Neighborhood Tabu Search (HVNTS) that mostly deals with infeasible solutions, because it is assumed that one may not reach some regions of the search space without passing through infeasible solutions. In this short paper, we propose a simpler Variable Neighborhood Search heuristic where all the computational effort is spent on searching for feasible solutions. Computational experiments showed that the proposed heuristic is competitive with the best heuristic in the literature.