Tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and customers -- rev. revised edition. Publication No. 987

This paper considers a version of the stochastic vehicle routing problem where customers are present with some probability and have random demands. A tabu search heuristic is developed for this problem. Comparisons with known optimal solutions indicate that the heuristic solves the problem to optimality in the vast majority of cases and deviations from optimality are almost always small.