Paper Info
Title
Variable-Depth Search for the Single-Vehicle Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows
Abstract
We consider a single depot and a set of customers with known demands, each of which must be picked up and delivered at specified locations and within given time windows. We seek a route and a schedule for a single vehicle with known capacity, which minimizes the route duration, i.e., the difference between the arrival time and the departure time at the depot. We develop a local search method for this problem based on a variable-depth search, similar to the Lin-Kernighan algorithm for the traveling salesman problem. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase, a feasible route is constructed; in the second phase, it is iteratively improved. In both phases, we use a variable-depth search built up out of seven basic types of arc-exchange procedures. When tested on real-life problems, the method is shown to produce near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time. In spite of this, there is the theoretical possibility that the method may end up with a poor or even infeasible solution. As a safeguard against such an emergency, we have developed an alternative algorithm based on simulated annealing. As a rule, it finds high quality solutions in a relatively large computation time.
Year
DOI
Venue
1993
10.1287/trsc.27.3.298
Transportation Science
Field
DocType
Volume
Simulated annealing,Mathematical optimization,Iterative method,Depth-first search,Travelling salesman problem,Schedule,Local search (optimization),Pickup,Operations management,Mathematics,Computation
Journal
27
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0041-1655
33
PageRank 
References 
Authors
6.01
2
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
L. J. J. van der Bruggen1336.01
J. K. Lenstra21689329.39
P. C. Schuur38714.40