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Recent progress of local search in handling the time window constraints of the vehicle routing problem

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Abstract

Vehicle routing and scheduling problems have a wide range of applications and have been intensively studied in the past half century. The condition that enforces each vehicle to start service at each customer in the period specified by the customer is called the time window constraint. This paper reviews recent results on how to handle hard and soft time window constraints, putting emphasis on its different definitions and algorithms. With these diverse time windows, the problem becomes applicable to a wide range of real-world problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Mathematical Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan

    Hideki Hashimoto

  2. Department of Computer Science and Mathematical Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

    Mutsunori Yagiura

  3. Department of Computational Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan

    Shinji Imahori

  4. The Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics, 7 Monzencho, Tanaka, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8225, Japan

    Toshihide Ibaraki

Authors
  1. Hideki Hashimoto
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  2. Mutsunori Yagiura
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  3. Shinji Imahori
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  4. Toshihide Ibaraki
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Correspondence to Toshihide Ibaraki.

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This is an updated version of the paper that appeared in 4OR, 8(3), 221–238 (2010).

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Hashimoto, H., Yagiura, M., Imahori, S. et al. Recent progress of local search in handling the time window constraints of the vehicle routing problem. Ann Oper Res 204, 171–187 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1264-5

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