An improved savings method for vehicle routing problem

The Clarke and Wright's savings method is a classical and widely used heuristics for the Vehicle routing problem(VRP). It is an effective method which reaches a reasonably good solution for small and medium size problems. For large-scale VRP, more complex heuristics are developed by different scholars. In this paper, an improved savings method has been proposed based on modification the rules of forming new links during iteration. The improved savings method offers a better solution than the classical savings method in the given example. Numerical experiments are conducted to test the effectiveness of the algorithm. The result shows that the improved savings method offers a better solution than classical savings method in about 75 percent situation in every 1000 numerical experiments.