Heuristic with elements of tabu search for Truck and Trailer Routing Problem

TL;DR

This paper presents a heuristic algorithm incorporating elements of Tabu Search to effectively solve a complex, NP-hard truck and trailer routing problem with time windows and split deliveries, addressing real-world logistics challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel heuristic combining neighborhood search and infeasible solution exploration specifically for the Site-Dependent Truck and Trailer Routing Problem with time windows and split deliveries.

Findings

The heuristic effectively finds high-quality solutions for SDTTRPTWSD.

Infeasible solution exploration improves search flexibility and solution quality.

The method demonstrates practical applicability to complex routing scenarios.

Abstract

Vehicle Routing Problem is a well-known problem in logistics and transportation, and the variety of such problems is explained by the fact that it occurs in many real-life situations. It is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and finding an exact optimal solution is practically impossible. In this work, Site-Dependent Truck and Trailer Routing Problem with hard and soft Time Windows and Split Deliveries is considered (SDTTRPTWSD). In this article, we develop a heuristic with the elements of Tabu Search for solving SDTTRPTWSD. The heuristic uses the concept of neighborhoods and visits infeasible solutions during the search. A greedy heuristic is applied to construct an initial solution.