Nuevas técnicas de construcción de rutas para el caso del Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

[Abstract] In the last decades, the well-known problem of vehicle routing has derived into a number of different variants. One of these variants is the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. It is in 1987 when the bottom line of the different solutions techniques is established, since in that date, Solomon (1987) presents a state of the art research, as well as a number of benchmark problems. Since then, the development of solution techniques has increased exponentially, although most of these are based on the previous works of Solomon. In this paper we examine a number of new techniques in order to build up the routes from scratch, integrating dispersed customers into the routes the vehicles must conduct, and respecting at all times the capacity and time requirements restrictions. By using these new techniques we outperform previous methods in some of the benchmark problems, as well as the computation time needed.