A Local Search Descent Method Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper describes a heuristic in solving vehicle routing problem with time windows(VRPTW),called local search descent method based on λ-interchange.VRPTW is to serve a number of customers with known demand and predefined time windows at minimum cost,without violating the capacity and total time constraints for each vehicle.It is a typical NP-hard problem and best solved to near optimum by heuristics.These two experiments show the excellent performance of the algorithm and obtain good solution.Furthermore this algorithm can be a basic cornerstone of the more complex heuristics.