A general framework for nested variable neighborhood search

Abstract

In this paper we review a recently proposed variant of variable neighborhood search (VNS) referred to as nested variable neighborhood search (NVNS) and propose a generalization of this approach. In addition, we develop a heuristic stemming from this general framework and apply it on the capacitated clustering problem (CCP). Based on obtained results the proposed heuristic outperforms the current state-of-the-art for the CCP.