Parallelization of a gossip algorithm for vehicle routing problems

A large body of research on the vehicle routing problem and its variants focuses on developing efficient solution procedures. Yet, not so many research articles have addressed parallelism in their proposed algorithms. Parallelized optimization algorithms can yield better solution quality in less amount of time. The main contribution of this paper is parallelization of a distributed algorithm based on the gossip protocol for vehicle routing problems VRP. The proposed algorithm can be applied to different variants of VRPs. While the resulting speed-ups are promising, the required effort for implementation of the parallelism is minimal, which makes the algorithm even more appealing.