In this paper another kind of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) ¾ the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is studied, in which the vehicles are not required to return to the depot, or if they are required to do so 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 solution. The computational results are provided and compared with two other methods in the literature