Flow based heuristics for the multiple traveling salesman problem with time windows

In this paper, new algorithms for solving the multiple traveling salesman problem with time windows are presented. These algorithms are based on the flow based algorithms for solving the vehicle scheduling problem. Computational results on problems up to 750 customers indicate that these algorithms produce superior results to existing heuristic algorithms for solving the vehicle routing problems when the time windows are 'tight enough' where 'tight enough' is based on a metric proposed by desrosiers et al.(1987).