An Improved Tabu Search Approach to Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle Routing Problems have very important applications in the area of distribution management. VRP is both of theoretical and practical interest (due to its real world applications), which explains the amount of attention given to the VRP by researchers in the past years, and since VRP is an NP-Hard problems. In this paper, we designed and realized a new Tabu Search by introducing mutation and mixed local searching tactics for overcoming the weaknesses of the current TS. Here we are concerned with algorithm strategies and parameters and how they affect the performance of the designed Tabu Search. After comparing the Improved Tabu Search with other algorithms, the excellent performance of the Improved Tabu Search is shown. First, the qualities of solutions of the Improved Tabu Search to VRP are very good whether the size of problems is big or small; second, the Improved Tabu Search algorithm is very stable; finally, the convergent speed is fast, with high calculating efficiency.