An asynchronous parallel metaheuristic for the period vehicle routing problem

This paper presents an asynchronous parallel metaheuristic for the period vehicle routing problem (PVRP). The PVRP generalizes the classical vehicle routing problem by extending the planning period from a single day to M days. The algorithm proposed is based on concepts used in parallel genetic algorithms and local search heuristics. The algorithm employs the Island model in which the migration frequency must not be very high. The results of computational experiments carried out on problems taken from the literature indicate that the proposed approach outperforms existing heuristics in most cases. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.