ROADEF 2026>
Randomized Constructive Heuristics for the VRPTW
Florian Rascoussier  1, 2@  , Christine Solnon  2@  , Romain Billot  1@  , Lina Fahed  1, 3@  
1 : Laboratoire des sciences et techniques de l'information, de la communication et de la connaissance
Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Brest, Université de Bretagne Sud, Université de Brest, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IMT Atlantique, École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées
2 : CITI Centre of Innovation in Telecommunications and Integration of services
Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
3 : IMT Atlantique, Lab-STICC, UMR CNRS 6285, F-29238 Brest, France
IMT Atlantique

This study investigates randomized constructive heuristics for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), focusing on the Nearest Neighbor, Best Insertion, and Regret-k heuristics. While these methods are fundamental deterministic initializers for metaheuristics like Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), their potential within a randomized, multi-start framework remains under-explored. We propose a novel randomization strategy for the Regret-k heuristic — a topic previously absent from the literature — by distinguishing between the customer selection ("who") and insertion position ("where") decisions. Specifically, we introduce a probabilistic selection mechanism proportional to regret values. The proposed heuristics are implemented in C++ bound to Python and evaluated on classic Solomon and Gehring & Homberger benchmarks (100 - 1000 customers) following DIMACS 2021 conventions. Results are compared against Best Known Solutions and the state-of-the-art Hybrid Genetic Search (HGS), offering new insights for the design of efficient hybrid metaheuristics.


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