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A new tabu search heuristic for the open vehicle routing problem

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Journal of the Operational Research Society

Abstract

In this paper, another version of the vehicle routing problem (VRP)—the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is studied, in which the vehicles are not required to return to the depot, but if they do, it must be by revisiting the customers assigned to them in the reverse order. By exploiting the special structure of this type of problem, we present a new tabu search heuristic for finding the routes that minimize two objectives while satisfying three constraints. The computational results are provided and compared with two other methods in the literature.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 70071003) and China Scholarship Council. We were also grateful to José Brandão and the two anonymous referees whose comments helped us to improve the presentation of this paper.

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Correspondence to Z Fu.

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Fu, Z., Eglese, R. & Li, L. A new tabu search heuristic for the open vehicle routing problem. J Oper Res Soc 56, 267–274 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601817

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601817

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