A heuristic algorithm for a vehicle dispatching problem with changeable time window

An algorithm for a new vehicle dispatch model with changeable time window is proposed. The customer calls company and asks for service and time window for service, and the company arrange the appropriate position for each customer without violating time window constraint. If the need of customer can not be satisfied, other time windows are advised to the customer for selection. Firstly, the initial routings are constructed by some strategy in which the changeable time window is considered, and then a tabu search algorithm is employed to improve the initial routings to minimize the total traveling cost. With the customer data produced randomly the experiment results indicate that the algorithm produces encouraging performance.