Researches On Algorithms For Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) has been a well-known problem in operation research since it was presented by Dantizig and Ramser in 1978. But VRP only concerns the spatial aspects and ignores the temporal aspects. This is not enough in the real life application, so vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) was presented which is to determine the most favorable vehicle routes that minimize the total cost when the capacity constrains and time window constrains are satisfied. VRPTW and extensions of it draw attentions from many researchers and the optimal algorithms and heuristic algorithms have developed.This paper is devoted to researching on the algorithms for VRPTW. The main work is that we proposed mathematic models and hybrid heuristic algorithms which are based on parallel inserting heuristics and Tabu search heuristics for vehicle routing problem with time windows where a limited number of vehicles is given (m-VRPTW) and the bi-objective vehicle routing problem with time windows (BVRPTW). The results of the computational experiments showed that the proposed algorithms are successful.