A hybrid large neighborhood search for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows

In this paper, we investigate the use of the large neighborhood search for solving the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Such a problem may be viewed as a variant of the capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows, where both precedence and coupling constraints are considered. The proposed method is based on the framework of the large neighborhood search combined with local search procedures. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it has been tested on Li et al. ´s benchmark instances. The obtained results are compared to those reached by the best method available in the literature. Encouraging results have been obtained.