A Metaheuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows.pdf

A Metaheuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows Haibing Li and Andrew Lim Department of Computer Science National University of Singapore Singapore, 117543 lihaibin, alim
@comp.nus.edu.sg Abstract In this paper, we propose a metaheuristic to solve the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Our ap- proach is a tabu-embedded simulated annealing algorithm which restarts a search procedure from the current best so- lution after several non-improving search iterations. The computational experiments on the six newly-generated dif- ferent data sets marked our algorithm as the first approach to solve large multiple-vehicle PDPTW problem instances with various distribution properties. 1 Introduction The class of Vehicle routing problems(VRP) is an inten- sive research area because of its usefulness to the logistics and transportation industry. Many new side constraints have been added to meet real life needs. A famous extension is the vehicle routing problem with time windows(VRPTW). Another useful extension that has been proposed to VRPTW is to handle pickup and delivery where goods must be collected at a predetermined customer location before it is delivered to another specified customer location. There- fore, two additional side constraints are introduced. One is known as the precedence constraint and the other one is the coupling constraint. The two constraints require that any paired pickup and delivery locations must be serviced by the same vehicle and the pickup location must be sched- uled before the corresponding delivery location in the route. Practical applications of this extension include the dial-a- ride problem, airline scheduling, bus routing, etc. Let us define the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW) formally. Let   be a digraph.  is the node set where ! # $% )(* ,+-+,+. /% 0/1$3254,64-/7 represents the customers and node  denotes the depot where a fleet of vehi