Parallel VNS for Bus Terminal Location Problem

Abstract

This paper considers the Bus Terminal Location Problem (BTLP) which incorporates characteristics of both the p-median and maximal covering problems. We propose a parallel variable neighborhood search algorithm (PVNS) for solving BTLP. Improved local search, based on efficient neighborhood interchange, is used for the p-median problem, and is combined with a reduced neighborhood size for the maximal covering part of the problem. The proposed parallel algorithm is compared with its non-parallel version. Parallelization yielded significant time improvement in function of the processor core count. Computational results show that PVNS improves all existing results from the literature, while using significantly less time. New larger instances, based on rl instances from the TSP library, are introduced and computational results for those new instances are reported.