This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description: The attribute based hill climber (ABHC) is a variant of the general tabu-search principle which has shown to be competitive with respect to quality as well as efficiency to other local search heuristics for the two corner stone problems in combinatorial optimization: the travelling salesman problem and the quadratic assignment problem. ABHC is completely parameter-free, and its generic logic depends on the concept of partitioning the solution space based on solution ''attributes'', which is the problem-specific choice. In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of this concept and the efficiency of the ABHC heuristic for the general vehicle routing problem.