Vehicle Routing Problems with Soft Time Windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is to serve a set of customer demands with time constraints and vehicle with limited capacity. This has practical applications in container truck routing, delivery service scheduling, garbage collection, fleet network design etc. In this paper, we consider one of its variants where the time constraint is `soft´, that is it can be violated with a penalty cost. In this paper, we present the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) metaheuristic based approach for solving the VRPTW problem with soft timing constraint. We have shown our experimental results for different parameters, compared with previous results and shown that our algorithm gives better result for many instances of the problem.