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Using Constraint Programming and Local Search Methods to Solve Vehicle Routing Problems

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP98 (CP 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1520))

Abstract

We use a local search method we term Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS) to solve vehicle routing problems. LNS is analogous to the shuffing technique of job-shop scheduling, and so meshes well with constraint programming technology. LNS explores a large neighbourhood of the current solution by selecting a number of “related” customer visits to remove from the set of planned routes, and re-inserting these visits using a constraint-based tree search. Unlike similar methods, we use Limited Discrepancy Search during the tree search to re-insert visits. We analyse the performance of our method on benchmark problems. We demonstrate that results produced are competitive with Operations Research meta-heuristic methods, indicating that constraint-based technology is directly applicable to vehicle routing problems

This work was carried out while the author was working in the Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde, as part of the APES research group. The author wishes to thank all members of APES for their help and support

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ILOG S.A., 9, rue de Verdun, BP 85, 94253, Gentilly Cedex, France

    Paul Shaw

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  1. Paul Shaw
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Technology, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, 4111, Australia

    Michael Maher

  2. ILOG S.A., 9, rue de Verdun, BP 85, F-94253, Gentilly Cedex, France

    Jean-Francois Puget

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Shaw, P. (1998). Using Constraint Programming and Local Search Methods to Solve Vehicle Routing Problems. In: Maher, M., Puget, JF. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP98. CP 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1520. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49481-2_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49481-2_30

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65224-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49481-2

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