No label defined (Q4955265)

This paper deals with development of the solving techniques for large-scale vehicle routing problems during last decade. This process has been joined with metaheuristic expansion in the field of combinatorial problems. The authors give a concise overview of three of the most frequently used mataheuristics, which are tabu search, simulated annealing and deterministic annealing. The overview contains also the history of their applications to vehicle routing within the last decade. Reporting on the sequence of applications, the authors demonstrate the gradually increasing number of improving procedures used in these algorithms, to manage the increasing size of the solved vehicle routing problems. Regarding the increasing size, they analyse the classical set of VRP benchmark problems, state its insufficiency and suggest to enlarge the original set by the sequence of large-scale problems, which were solved recently and which are reported in the study. At the end of the paper, parameters of the metaheuristics and their fine-tuning are discussed and future possible directions in the vehicle routing research are outlined and valuable recommendation for researchers are enclosed. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0933.00021].