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Variable neighborhood search for the travelling deliveryman problem

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Abstract

A travelling deliveryman needs to find a tour such that the total waiting time of all the customers he has to visit is minimum. The deliveryman starts his tour at a depot, travelling at constant velocity. In this paper we suggest a general variable neighborhood search based heuristic to solve this NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. We combine several classical neighborhood structures and design data structure to store and update the incumbent solution efficiently. In this way, we are able to explore neighborhoods as efficiently as when solving the travelling salesman problem. Computational results obtained on usual test instances show that our approach outperforms recent heuristics from the literature.

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Acknowledgments

The present research work has been supported by Research Grants 174010 and III 044006 of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development. The present research work has been also supported by International Campus on Safety and Intermodality in Transportation the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Region, the European Community, the Regional Delegation for Research and Technology, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and the National Center for Scientific Research. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of these institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK

    Nenad Mladenović

  2. Mathematical Institute, Belgrade, Serbia

    Dragan Urošević

  3. LAMIH-Université de Valenciennes, Valenciennes, France

    Saïd Hanafi

Authors
  1. Nenad Mladenović
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  2. Dragan Urošević
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  3. Saïd Hanafi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dragan Urošević.

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Mladenović, N., Urošević, D. & Hanafi, S. Variable neighborhood search for the travelling deliveryman problem. 4OR-Q J Oper Res 11, 57–73 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10288-012-0212-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10288-012-0212-1

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