Algorithms for the vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints. (English) Zbl 0625.90047

Solomon, Marius M.

Oper. Res. 35, 254-265 (1987).

This paper considers the design and analysis for vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints. Given the intrinsic difficulty of this problem class, approximation methods seem to offer the most promise for practical size problems. After describing a variety of heuristics, we conduct an extensive computational study of their performance. The problem set includes routing and scheduling environments that differ in terms of the type of data used to generate the problems, the percentage of customers with time windows, their tightness and positioning, and the scheduling horizon. We found that several heuristics performed well in different problem environments; in particular an insertion-type heuristic consistently gave very good results.

MSC:

90B35	Deterministic scheduling theory in operations research
65K05	Numerical mathematical programming methods

Keywords:

vehicle routing; time window constraints; heuristics