Tabu Search for urban freight VRP: Fundamental aspects and parameters tuning evaluation

This paper capitalizes some fundamental aspects of the Tabu Search (TS) as a strategy for combinatorial optimization problems, especially Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) for urban good distribution. in the last 2 decades or so, TS has proven his efficiency in treating different variants of VRP. The current study addresses the basic components and procedures of any TS, such as, the local search, the adaptive memory and the processes for intensifying and diversifying the search. Furthermore, an overview of pertinent works on TS related to VRP is provided. Latterly, the impact of each parameter on the performance of a given process of the TS is also evaluated by a proposed TS heuristic.