This section offers some insights into the relative complexity of the various predefined first solution heuristics. These hints are meant to help you decide which heuristics to use with your problem. Of course, every problem is different and no set of guidelines can account for all this diversity. A best approach is to start by following these guidelines, but to be flexible in trying different first solution heuristics. It can also be interesting to try several first solution methods and to apply local search to these different methods. You may also want to apply local search to an existing first solution.

If you are not able to create a first solution using the predefined heuristics, you may want to build your own. In other situations, you may want to build your own first solution heuristic because your problem has a specific structure that is not reflected in the predefined heuristics. For example, you may want to load your own trucks first and then load trucks belonging to contractors. For these situations, you can build your own first solution directly or using the Dispatcher first solution framework.