Beam search based delivery scheduling system

The authors propose a heuristic procedure to solve the routing phase of the delivery scheduling problem. Aiming fast responses a beam search based decision procedure is utilized. Within the search procedure, a new evaluation rule called the 'most willing neighbor' is applied. The new rule retains the simplicity of the nearest neighbor rule, overcoming the latter's weak points. Three applications are presented and compared with the results obtained in 20 runs of the well-known 3-opt procedure. The proposed system presented flexibility, high quality solutions with very fast responses.<
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