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A Three-Stage Heuristic for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

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Recent Advances in Computational Optimization

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 580))

Abstract

In this paper we propose to solve the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW) by using a three-stage solution procedure. CVRPTW is defined by a set of customers (with associated demands and time windows) and a set of vehicles (with a given capacity) and the aim of the problem is to serve all the customers inside their respective time windows. There are two objectives to optimize, the first one consists in using the minimum number of vehicles and the second one is to minimize the total distance traveled by all the vehicles. The proposed heuristic combines (i) a clustering stage in which the set of customers is divided into disjoint clusters, (ii) a building stage that serves to provide a feasible tour in each cluster and, (iii) a local-search stage that is applied in order to try to improve the quality of the solutions obtained from the second stage. The computational investigation, conducted on a class of benchmark instances of the literature, shows that the results reached by the proposed heuristic remain competitive when compared to the best known solutions taken from the literature.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISC Paris Business School, 22 Boulevard du Fort de Vaux, 75017, Paris, France

    Hakim Akeb

  2. MSE Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 6–12 Bd de L’Hôpital, 75013, Paris, France

    Adel Bouchakhchoukha

  3. Université de Picardie Jules Verne, UR EPROAD, Équipe ROAD, 7 Rue du Moulin Neuf, 80039, Amiens, France

    Adel Bouchakhchoukha & Mhand Hifi

Authors
  1. Hakim Akeb
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  2. Adel Bouchakhchoukha
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  3. Mhand Hifi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hakim Akeb .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Parallel Algorithms, Institute of Information and CommunicationTechnology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Stefka Fidanova

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Akeb, H., Bouchakhchoukha, A., Hifi, M. (2015). A Three-Stage Heuristic for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows . In: Fidanova, S. (eds) Recent Advances in Computational Optimization. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 580. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12631-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12631-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12630-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12631-9

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