A novel two-phase heuristic method for vehicle routing problem with backhauls

  • Authors:

  • Zhiwu Wang;Zhengguo Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • Henan Institute of Engineering, Zhengzhou, 450052, PR China and Institute of System Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, PR China;Institute of System Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, PR China

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Mathematics with Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper raises a novel two-phase heuristic method to solve vehicle routing problems with backhauls. Differing from other vehicle routing problems, we consider the travel speed of vehicle to be time dependent, which will be used for the model of rush hour in an urban city. In the first phase, the original solution is generated by extending traditional heuristic methods and in the second phase, the reactive tabu search algorithm is used to optimize the original solution. We verified that this algorithm is efficient in a number of standard test cases. After comparison with the closest neighboring search algorithm, we found that the results of two-phase heuristic methods are more reasonable.