Combining Constraint Programming and Tabu Search to Solve Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper presents a new two-stage approach to solve Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. The first stage aims to minimize the number of routes and the second stage is to minimize the travel distance. The approach is also based on a combination of Tabu search method and constraint programming technology. The main idea is to apply the power of constraint propagation in constraint programming to reduce the computational cost when Tabu search needs to scan the whole neighborhood to find the best non-tabu moves at each iteration.