Tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

This dissertation tackles the Vehicle Routing Problem on the map of Malta using a Tabu Search heuristic. Given a demand for each customer, the algorithm searches for the cheapest way of servicing the customer set but does not guarantee an optimum. The Vehicle Routing Problem in this dissertation has a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles with different capacities and varying costs of operation. A procedure to find an initial solution was tailor made for the data of this dissertation, where each customer represents a village or city in Malta. A lower bound to the vehicle routing problem is found which was used to determine the quality of the solutions found. The heuristic that was developed was then adapted to exploit the power of parallel computing. All computations are done using MATLAB.