Pickup and delivery problem with time windows: Algorithms and test case generation

• Main Authors: LAU, Hoong Chuin, LIANG, Zhe
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2001
• Subjects: Pickup and delivery problem; vehicle routing problem; tabu search; test case generation; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1119; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2118/viewcontent/ICTAI2001.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In the pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDPTW), vehicles have to transport loads from origins to destinations respecting capacity and time constraints. In this paper, we present a two-phase method to solve the PDPTW. In the first phase, we apply a novel construction heuristics to generate an initial solution. In the second phase, a tabu search method is proposed to improve the solution. Another contribution of this paper is a strategy to generate good problem instances and benchmarking solutions for PDPTW, based on Solomon's benchmark test cases for VRPTW. Experimental results show that our approach yields very good solutions when compared with the benchmarking solutions.