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A study of perturbation operators for the pickup and delivery traveling salesman problem with LIFO or FIFO loading

Journal of Heuristics volume 21, pages 617–639 (2015)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper investigates perturbation operators for variable neighborhood search (VNS) approaches for two related problems, namely the pickup and delivery traveling salesman problem with LIFO loading (TSPPDL) and FIFO loading (TSPPDF). Our study is motivated by the fact that previously published results on VNS approaches on the TSPPDL suggest that the perturbation operation has the most significant effect on solution quality. We propose a new perturbation operator for the TSPPDL that achieves better results on average than the existing best approach. We also devise new perturbation operators for the TSPPDF that combine request removal and request insertion operations, and investigate which combination of request removal and request insertion operations produces the best results. Our resultant VNS that employs our best perturbation operator outperforms the best existing TSPPDF approach on benchmark test data.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71401065, 71201065).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330013, People’s Republic of China

    Lijun Wei & Long Wan

  2. School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan, China

    Hu Qin

  3. School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, People’s Republic of China

    Wenbin Zhu

Authors
  1. Lijun Wei
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  2. Hu Qin
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  3. Wenbin Zhu
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  4. Long Wan
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Correspondence to Wenbin Zhu.

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Wei, L., Qin, H., Zhu, W. et al. A study of perturbation operators for the pickup and delivery traveling salesman problem with LIFO or FIFO loading. J Heuristics 21, 617–639 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-015-9293-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-015-9293-2

Keywords

  • Traveling salesman
  • Pickup and delivery
  • Last-in-first-out loading
  • First-in-first-out loading
  • Perturbation operator