1998 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Using Constraint Programming and Local Search Methods to Solve Vehicle Routing Problems
Author : Paul Shaw
Published in: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP98
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Included in: Professional Book Archive
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We use a local search method we term Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS) to solve vehicle routing problems. LNS is analogous to the shuffing technique of job-shop scheduling, and so meshes well with constraint programming technology. LNS explores a large neighbourhood of the current solution by selecting a number of “related” customer visits to remove from the set of planned routes, and re-inserting these visits using a constraint-based tree search. Unlike similar methods, we use Limited Discrepancy Search during the tree search to re-insert visits. We analyse the performance of our method on benchmark problems. We demonstrate that results produced are competitive with Operations Research meta-heuristic methods, indicating that constraint-based technology is directly applicable to vehicle routing problems