Indirect search for the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery and time windows.

The vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery and time windows (VRPPDTW) is one of the prominent members studied in the class of rich vehicle routing problems and it has become one of the challenges for developing heuristics which are accurate and fast at the same time. Indirect local search heuristics are ideally suited to flexibly handle complex constraints as those occurring in rich combinatorial optimization problems by separating the problem of securing feasibility of solutions from the objective-driven metaheuristic search process using simple encodings and appropriate decoders. In this paper we show that the approach of indirect local search with greedy decoding (GIST) is not only flexible and simple but when applied to the VRPPDTW it also gives results which are competitive with state-of-the-art VRPPDTW-methods by Li and Lim, as well as Pankratz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]