TY - JOUR

T1 - Investigating the use of metaheuristics for solving single vehicle routing problems with time-varying traversal costs

AU - Harwood, Kieran

AU - Mumford, Christine

AU - Eglese, Richard

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - Metaheuristic algorithms, such as simulated annealing and tabu search, are popular solution techniques for vehicle routing problems (VRPs). These approaches rely on iterative improvements to a starting solution, involving slight alterations to the routes (i.e. neighbourhood moves), moving a node to a different part of a solution, swapping nodes or inverting sections of a tour, for example. When working with standard VRPs, where the costs of the arcs do not vary with advancing time, evaluating changes to the total cost following a neighbourhood move is a simple process: simply subtract the costs of the links removed from the solution and add the costs for the new links. When a time varying aspect (e.g. congestion) is included in the costs, these calculations become estimations rather than exact values. This paper focuses on a single vehicle VRP, similar to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and investigates the potential for using estimation methods on simple models with time-variant costs, mimicking the effects of road congestion.

AB - Metaheuristic algorithms, such as simulated annealing and tabu search, are popular solution techniques for vehicle routing problems (VRPs). These approaches rely on iterative improvements to a starting solution, involving slight alterations to the routes (i.e. neighbourhood moves), moving a node to a different part of a solution, swapping nodes or inverting sections of a tour, for example. When working with standard VRPs, where the costs of the arcs do not vary with advancing time, evaluating changes to the total cost following a neighbourhood move is a simple process: simply subtract the costs of the links removed from the solution and add the costs for the new links. When a time varying aspect (e.g. congestion) is included in the costs, these calculations become estimations rather than exact values. This paper focuses on a single vehicle VRP, similar to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and investigates the potential for using estimation methods on simple models with time-variant costs, mimicking the effects of road congestion.

KW - vehicle routing

KW - time varying

KW - congestion

KW - Road Timetable

KW - 2-Opt

U2 - 10.1057/jors.2012.17

DO - 10.1057/jors.2012.17

M3 - Journal article

VL - 64

SP - 34

EP - 47

JO - Journal of the Operational Research Society

JF - Journal of the Operational Research Society

SN - 0160-5682

ER -