Local search with annealing-like restarts to solve the VRPTW

In this paper, we propose a metaheuristic based on annealing-like restarts to diversify and intensify local searches for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Using the Solomon's benchmark instances for the problem, our method obtained seven new best results and equaled 19 other best results. Extensive comparisons indicate that our method is comparable to the best in published literature. This approach is flexible and can be extended to handle other variants of vehicle routing problems and other combinatorial optimization problems. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V.. All rights reserved.