Abstract
The vehicle routing problem with pickups, deliveries and time windows (PDPTW) is an important member in the class of vehicle routing problems. In this paper a general heuristic to construct an initial feasible solution is proposed and compared with other construction methods. New route reconstruction heuristics are then shown to improve on this. These reconstruction heuristics look to reorder individual routes and recombine multiple routes to decrease the number of vehicles used in the solution. A tabu search scheme where the attribute to be recorded has been specifically adapted to the PDPTW is proposed. A new method based on branch and bound optimisation attempts to optimise the final ordering of requests in routes to further improve the solutions. Results are analysed for a standard set of benchmark instances and are shown to be competitive with the state of the art.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Laporte, G., Osman, I.: Routing problems: A bibliography. Annals of Operations Research 61, 227–262 (1995)
Savelsbergh, M.W.P., Sol, M.: The general pickup and delivery problem. Transportation Science 29(1), 17–29 (1995)
Psaraftis, H.: An exact algorithm for the single vehicle many-to-many dial-a-ride problem with time windows. Transportation Science 17(3), 351–357 (1983)
Jaw, J., Odoni, A., Psaraftis, H., Wilson, N.: A heuristic algorithm for the multi-vehicle advance request dial-a-ride problem with time windows. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 20, 243–257 (1986)
Cordeau, J.F., Laporte, G.: The dial-a-ride problem: models and algorithms. Annals of Operations Research 153(1), 29–46 (2007)
Nanry, W., Barnes, J.: Solving the pickup and delivery problem with time windows using reactive tabu search. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 34(2), 107–121 (2000)
Lau, H., Liang, Z.: Pickup and delivery with time windows: algorithms and test case generation. In: The 13th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2001, Dallas, USA, pp. 333–340 (2001)
Li, H., Lim, A.: A metaheuristic for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. In: The 13th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2001, Dallas, USA, pp. 160–167 (2001)
Solomon, M.M.: Algorithms for the vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints. Operations Research 35(2), 254–265 (1987)
Bent, R., Van Hentenryck, P.: A two-stage hybrid algorithm for pickup and delivery vehicle routing problems with time windows. Computers & Operations Research 33(4), 875–893 (2006)
Ropke, R., Pisinger, D.: An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Transportation Science 40(4), 455–472 (2006)
Pankratz, G.: A grouping genetic algorithm for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. OR Spectrum 27, 21–41 (2005)
Ding, G., Li, L., Ju, Y.: Multi-strategy grouping genetic algorithm for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. In: GEC 2009: Proceedings of the first ACM/SIGEVO Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 97–104. ACM, New York (2009)
Dergis, U., Dohmer, T.: Indirect search for the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery and time windows. OR Spectrum 30, 149–165 (2008)
Lim, H., Lim, A., Rodrigues, B.: Solving the pickup and delivery problem with time windows using “squeaky wheel” optimization with local search. In: Proceedings of AMCIS 2002, pp. 2335–2344 (2002)
Carabetti, E., de Souza, S., Fraga, M.: An application of the ant colony system metaheuristic to the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery and time windows. In: Eleventh Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks 2010, pp. 176–181 (2010)
Or, I.: Traveling salesman-type combinatorial problems and their relation the logistics of regional blood banking. PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (1976)
Glover, F.: Tabu search part 1. ORSA Journal on Computing 1(3), 190–206 (1989)
Montané, F.A.T., Galvão, R.D.: A tabu search algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-up and delivery service. Computers and Operations Research 33(3), 595–619 (2006)
Berbeglia, G., Cordeau, J.F., Laporte, G.: Dynamic pickup and delivery problems. European Journal of Operational Research 202(1), 8–15 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Holborn, P.L., Thompson, J.M., Lewis, R. (2012). Combining Heuristic and Exact Methods to Solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickups, Deliveries and Time Windows. In: Hao, JK., Middendorf, M. (eds) Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization. EvoCOP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7245. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29124-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29124-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29123-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29124-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)