Abstract: In order to promote the circulation of agricultural products and reduce the logistics distribution cost of agricultural products in the e-commerce industry, we propose a type of vehicle routing problem with soft time windows and split deliveries by unit. By relaxing the traditional condition that the customer demand can not be split, we design a new form of VRP with split deliveries by unit, and the hard time windows are also relaxed to soft time windows. Combined with the traditional model of vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), we construct a corresponding multi-objective mathematical model, and design an adaptive tabu search algorithm to solve the problem. The optimization results show that the way of split deliveries by unit can cut down the number of vehicle used and reduce the cost of distribution. Besides, embedding adaptive penalty mechanism and accepting some neighborhood solutions that violate the constraints can enhance the flexibility of distribution system and improve the global optimization performance of the tabu search algorithm.