The open vehicle routing problem with time windows (OVRPTW) is one of the well-known routing problems with many real-world applications, such as rail, bus and air transportation planning. In this paper, we propose a hybrid crow search algorithm (HCSA) to effectively solve the OVRPTW as a discrete problem. In the proposed HCSA, the hill climbing strategy is applied as a local search algorithm with three local search neighborhood structures. HCSA also uses the elitism approach to select the initial solutions of the OVRPTW. The effectiveness of the HCSA is demonstrated on two benchmark sets available in the literature: a small-scale benchmark of numerical examples and the Solomon’s benchmark instances. The results of the comparison confirm that HCSA produces very competitive results with respect to other published methods. From a set of 56 Solomon’s benchmark instances, HCSA computes 5 new best-known solutions and finds the best-known solution for more than 50% of the instances.
