An advanced approach for vehicle routing problem with time windows

In this paper, an advanced approach is proposed for vehicle routing problems with time windows (VRPTW). It takes the advantages of fuzzy c-means (FCM), simulated annealing, and tabu search for VRPTW. The Solomon's problem instances are used for verifying the developed approach. Based on the number of vehicles required and the traveling distance, good results are obtained when the number of customers is equal to 25. From simulation results, the developed approach finds the average number of vehicles and route costs are better than or equal to those of previous researches. The proposed approach can be used to solve the VRPTW and its search performance is admirable.