Benchmarking tabu search and simulated annealing for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Abstract

This paper addresses the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) consisting of a single depot and several customers that are supplied with goods by capacitated vehicles from a depot. The main objective of the vehicle routing problem is to minimize the traveled distance of all vehicles. We compare the Tabu Search (TS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm with different initial solution strategies to solve the CVRP. We run the publicly available solver on a set of benchmark problems comparing above mentioned methods and initial solutions. The results show that TS appears superior for small-sized problems, while SA has an advantage for mid-sized problems. For larger problems the preferability of a methods depends on the available run time with SA appear promising for shorter runtime and TS for longer.