Variable neighborhood descent for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows.

This paper is concerned with designing an integrated transportation solver for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW is one of the most tackled transportation problems in real-world situations. It consists in determining the minimum cost distance routes for a number of homogeneous vehicles stationed at a depot, that have a task of delivering goods to a number of customers within a specified time windows. As the VRPTW is known to be NP-hard combinatorial problem, it is hard to be solve in a reasonable computational time. Therefore, numerous metaheuristics-based approaches have been developed for finding near-optimal solution for VRPTW. To cope with the VRPTW, a VND approach is proposed. In order to demonstrate the performance of the approach in term of solution quality, we apply it on benchmark instances. The VND provided better results, in terms of solution quality, than existing approaches results.