Applying the attribute based hill climber heuristic to the vehicle routing problem

The attribute based hill climber (ABHC) is a variant of the general tabu-search principle which has shown to be competitive with respect to quality as well as efficiency to other local search heuristics for the two corner stone problems in combinatorial optimization: the travelling salesman problem and the quadratic assignment problem. ABHC is completely parameter-free, and its generic logic depends on the concept of partitioning the solution space based on solution "attributes", which is the problem-specific choice. In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of this concept and the efficiency of the ABHC heuristic for the general vehicle routing problem. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.