© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. This paper proposes three meta-heuristic algorithms, namely cuckoo search, central force optimization, and chemical reaction optimization for solving vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). A comparison study between different meta-heuristic algorithms aims to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses . The objective of VRPTW is to serve all customers, at different geographic locations, with varying demands and within specific time windows. The performance evaluation is tested on Solomon’s 56 benchmark instances of 100 customer problems, and yielded 24 solutions better than or equal to the best known solution provided by published papers. This paper is also among the first to document the implementation of all the three meta-heuristic algorithms for VRPTW together with their comprehensive results.