An assignment-based local search method for solving vehicle routing problems

In this paper, we propose an assignment-based local search method for solving vehicle routing problems. This method is a multi-route improvement algorithm that can operate on several routes at a time. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, extensive computational experiments on the proposed method applied to a set of benchmark problems are carried out. The results show that the proposed method, when coupled with metaheuristics such as simulated annealing, is comparable with other efficient heuristic methods proposed in the literature.