Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: The alns Python package provides a complete implementation of the adaptive large neighbourhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic algorithm (Pisinger & Røpke, 2010;Røpke & Pisinger, 2006).ALNS has quickly become a favourite in the field of operations research for solving difficult combinatorial problems, including the vehicle routing problem and various scheduling problems.Our package has an easy-to-use API and includes various stopping criteria, a large set of acceptance criteria based on Santini et al. (2018), and multiple operator selection schemes.Furthermore, it supports many other single-trajectory neighbourhood search algorithms as special cases, including iterated local search (ILS), variable neighbourhood search (VNS), and the greedy randomised adaptive search procedure (GRASP).The package has already been successfully used for research into methodological improvements of ALNS itself (Reijnen et al., 2022), and for the development of a high-quality ALNS metaheuristic solving an industry problem (Wouda et al., 2023).Because of this success, we expect the package to be useful to the wider operations research community.
DOI: 10.21105/joss.05028
Authors: Niels A. Wouda, Leon Lan
Institutions: University of Groningen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4317618599