A new tabu search heuristic for the open vehicle routing problem

Abstract

In this paper, another version of the vehicle routing problem (VRP)—the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is studied, in which the vehicles are not required to return to the depot, but if they do, it must be by revisiting the customers assigned to them in the reverse order. By exploiting the special structure of this type of problem, we present a new tabu search heuristic for finding the routes that minimize two objectives while satisfying three constraints. The computational results are provided and compared with two other methods in the literature.