Parallel Tabu Search and the Multiobjective Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

In this paper the author presents three approaches to parallel tabu search, applied to several instances of the capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows (CVRPTW). Attention in this work was given to keep the parallel implementations simple. The parallel algorithms are of two kinds: two of them are parallel with respect to functional decomposition and one approach is a collaborative multisearch TS. The implementation builds upon a framework called distributed meta-heuristics or DEME for short. Tests were performed on an SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria.