Comparison Study on Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

This paper investigates and compares heuristic algorithms for the vehicle routing problem with time windows. Three heuristic algorithms were proposed firstly through combining three classic heuristic algorithms with the cross exchange method (cross) and the 2-opt exchange heuristic (2-opt) respectively. These proposed algorithms are then compared with the three classical algorithms based on publicly available benchmark problems. The comparison results show that the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and their superiority to the classical algorithms.