A cooperative parallel metaheuristic for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

This paper introduces a cooperative parallel metaheuristic for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The proposed metaheuristic consists of multiple parallel tabu search threads that cooperate by asynchronously exchanging best found solutions through a common solution pool. The solutions sent to the pool are clustered according to their similarities. The search history information identified from the solution clusters is applied to guide the intensification or diversification of the tabu search threads. Computational experiments on two sets of large scale benchmarks from the literature demonstrate that the suggested metaheuristic is highly competitive, providing new best solutions to ten of those well-studied instances.