An adaptive parallel route construction heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows constraints

Vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a generalisation of the classical vehicle routing problem, where a group of customers with given capacity demand are required to be serviced, and the servicing of the customer demands has to be started within a restricted available time window at the customer locations. This class of routing problems can be used to solve many practical problems such as container truck routing, delivery service scheduling and many logistics system problems. In this paper, we present a route construction heuristic with an adaptive parallel scheme. The result from extensive computation experiments shows the proposed parallel route construction heuristic is efficient and effective for routes construction, which is particularly useful for generation of the initial solutions for many metaheuristic approaches with improved solution quality and convergence of the solution process. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.