ISEG - REM - Research in Economics and Mathematics
Abstract
The vehicle routing problem with backhauls and soft time windows contains two disjoint sets of
customers: those that receive goods from the depot, who are called linehauls, and those that send goods to the
depot, named backhauls. To each customer is associated an interval of time (time window), during which each
one should be served. If a time window can be violated it is called soft, but this violation implies an additional
cost. In this paper, only the upper limit of the interval can be exceeded. For solving this problem we created
deterministic iterated local search algorithm, which was tested using a large set of benchmark problems taken
from the literature. These computational tests have proven that this algorithm competes with best known
algorithms in terms of the quality of the solutions andcomputing time. So far as we know, there is no published
paper for this problem dealing with soft time windows, and, therefore, this comparison is only with the
algorithms that do not allow time windows violation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
