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From: R.G.Heller@Research.PTT.NL (Ron Heller)
Subject: Search for Heuristics 
Message-ID: <1994Sep22.111425.14521@news.research.ptt.nl>
Keywords: Heuristic, TSP, CVR
Sender: heller@sun032 (Ron Heller)
Nntp-Posting-Host: sun032.research.ptt.nl
Organization: PTT Research, Groningen, The Netherlands
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 11:14:25 GMT
Lines: 26

Greetings,

We are faced to the following problem:

We have to generate optimal routes in a mail collection problem. This is
collecting mail from collection centers to a transition point. Mail arrival
at the collection centers is spilt up into a number of time frames in which
mail arrives. The mail has to be at the transitionpoint as early as possible
, and the transportation costs must be minimized. As you can see this is an
extension on the CVR problem.

Till now we have a solution of which we know it will not produce optimal
solutions. Therefore we want to improve this approach using more problem
information (the current solution is heavily bounded for simplification). This
means that we need better heuristics to speed up the computation time.
Till now we use a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm to get a heuristic value
for the IDA* search algorithm.

Is there someone who has experience with, or know something about this problem
and can give us some usefull information about heuristics that can be used for
these kinds of problems?

Thanks in advance,

Ron Heller
(R.G.Heller@Research.PTT.NL)
