Forest vehicle routing problem solved by New Insertion and meta-heuristics

The main objective of the paper is to propose a mathematical method, based on New Insertion technique and meta-heuristics to solve forest transportation routing problem. To perform this work, firstly a mathematical model is proposed; secondly a New Insertion algorithm is used to build an initial solution and thirdly the extended great deluge and reactive tabu search are used to improve this solution. The objective is to minimize the total cost by respecting the time window of all customers, which is sometimes important in this field. Finally, the experimental results obtained with the extended great deluge for the named vehicle routing problem are showed, discussed and compared to its reactive tabu search results obtained using the same initial solution. The reactive tabu search is quicker than the extended great deluge; but instead of only one parameter to control in the extended great deluge, we have to control six parameters in reactive tabu search.