An efficient General Variable Neighborhood Search for large Travelling Salesman Problem with Time Windows

General Variable Neighborhood Search (GVNS) is shown to be a powerful and robust methodology for solving travelling salesman and vehicle routing problems. However, its efficient implementation may play a significant role in solving large size instances. In this paper we suggest new GVNS heuristic for solving Travelling salesman problem with time windows. It uses different set of neighborhoods, new feasibility checking procedure and a more efficient data structure than the recent GVNS method that can be considered as a state-of-the-art heuristic. As a result, our GVNS is much faster and more effective than the previous GVNS. It is able to improve 14 out of 25 best known solutions for large test instances from the literature.