Tabu search-based algorithm for capacitated multicommodity network design problem

The paper presents an efficient procedure to find good solutions to realistically sized fixed-charge, capacitated, multicommodity, network design problems. At present, there exists no algorithm that can solve large instances, common in several applications, in a reasonable period of time, so that heuristic procedures must be applied. The design problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming problem and solved by a procedure based on a tabu search meta-heuristic. Computational experiments were conducted and results are compared with those obtained by an evolutionary algorithm.