An Exchange Heuristic for Routeing Problems with Time Windows

Abstract

In this paper, we compare different exchange heuristics for vehicle routeing problems with time windows. We also introduce a new 2-opt* exchange heuristic, and show that a hybrid approach, based on Or-opt and 2-opt* exchanges, is particularly powerful for problems with time windows. Computational results are reported for randomly generated problems and for a standard test set.

Keywords:

• heuristics
• time windows
• vehicle routeing