An analysis on the destroy and repair process in large neighbourhood search applied on the vehicle routing problem with time windows

Abstract

Heuristics are most commonly evaluated using benchmark problems and comparing performance results with other methods. The aim is to be better than the competition. An investigation focused on understanding a heuristic method is rarely performed. We analyse the performance difference between two configurations of a large neighbourhood search algorithm applied on instances of the VRPTW and are able to explain the performance gap after analysing the destroy and repair process.