This paper describes a tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. This problem allows lateness at customer locations although a penalty is then incurred and added to the objective value. By adding large penalty values, the vehicle routing problem with hard time windows can be addressed as well. In the tabu search, a neighborhood of the current solution is crea...

In the context of increasing demands for home delivery fresh food, this article addresses terminal distribution problem in an urban environment, which is called vehicle routing probl...

The analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM) is one of successful methods to solve nondifferentiable optimization problems. In this paper ACCPM is used for the first time in the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to accelerate lagrangian relaxation procedure for the problem. At first the basic cutting plane algorithm and its relationship with column generation method is clari...