A Simple and Efficient Perturbation Heuristic to solve theVehicle Routing Problem

Many efficient meta-heuristics were developed to solve the vehicle routing problem (VRP). However, these heuristics often require large computation times and significant effort to implement. In this paper we propose a simple and efficient heuristic that only uses the Clarke and Wright’s savings heuristic, the 2-opt and the 3-opt improvement heuristics. It will be shown that the proposed heuristic yields solutions almost as good as those of most efficient meta-heuristics published previously. The proposed heuristic, for 34 benchmark instances, yielded solutions whose values lie on average within 0.97% of the best known solutions.