A Three-phase Heuristic Algorithm Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Traffic Lights

Classical models of vehicle routing problem with time windows consider the vehicle running process as a continuous process. In fact the running process is usually a segmentable process because of red lights, traffic jams and so on. In this paper we introduce the traffic lights into VRP problem and build a vehicle routing problem model with time windows and traffic lights, then we propose a three-phase heuristic algorithm based on tabu search to solve it. Experiment results show that the algorithm can solve the problem efficiently.