A new GA approach for the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

This paper focuses on the study of a hybrid of two search heuristics, tabu search (TS) and genetic algorithms (GA) in the vehicle routing problem with time-windows (VRPTW). TS is a local search technique that has been successfully applied to many NP-complete problems. On the other hand, a GA which is capable of searching multiple search areas in a search space is good for diversification. We investigate whether a hybrid of the two heuristics outperforms the individual heuristics.