Beam search based delivery scheduling system

The authors propose a heuristic procedure to solve the routing phase of the delivery scheduling problem. Aiming fast responses a beam search based decision procedure is utilized. Within the search procedure, a new evaluation rule called the `most willing neighbor´ is applied. The new rule retains the simplicity of the nearest neighbor rule, overcoming the latter´s weak points. Three applications are presented and compared with the results obtained in 20 runs of the well-known 3-opt procedure. The proposed system presented flexibility, high quality solutions with very fast responses