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Heuristic solutions for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronized visits

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Abstract

We present a simulated annealing based algorithm for a variant of the vehicle routing problem (VRP), in which a time window is associated with each client service and some services require simultaneous visits from different vehicles to be accomplished. The problem is called the VRP with time windows and synchronized visits. The algorithm features a set of local improvement methods to deal with various objectives of the problem. Experiments conducted on the benchmark instances from the literature clearly show that our method is fast and outperforms the existing approaches. It produces all known optimal solutions of the benchmark in very short computational times, and improves the best results for the rest of the instances.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Regional Council of Picardy and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), under PRIMA project. It was also partially supported by the National Agency for Research, under ATHENA project, reference ANR-13-BS02-0006-01. This work was carried out in the framework of the Labex MS2T, which was funded by the French Government, through the program “Investments for the future” managed by the National Agency for Research (Reference ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02). We would also like to thank the referees for their insightful comments that helped us improve the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sorbonne universités, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, CNRS, Heudiasyc UMR 7253, CS 60319, 60203, Compiègne cedex, France

    Sohaib Afifi & Aziz Moukrim

  2. ASAP Research Group, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK

    Duc-Cuong Dang

Authors
  1. Sohaib Afifi
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  2. Duc-Cuong Dang
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  3. Aziz Moukrim
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Correspondence to Sohaib Afifi.

Additional information

A preliminary version [1] of this paper was presented at the conference Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN (LION 7), 2013.

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Afifi, S., Dang, DC. & Moukrim, A. Heuristic solutions for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronized visits. Optim Lett 10, 511–525 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-015-0878-3

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