An Adaptation of the Tabu Search Metaheuristic to the Problem of Transportation Planning

This paper presents an adaptation of the tabu search metaheuristic to the problem of transportation planning in rail freight. The task is to decide which goods trains will be included in the daily timetable so that the transportation demands among stations can be satisfied at a minimum cost. A mathematical model of the problem and a solution method are described. Computational results are cited for randomly generated problems. Comparisons are made with an interchange heuristic.