Abstract
The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is classified as an NP-hard problem. Hence exact optimization methods may be difficult to solve these problems in acceptable CPU times, when the problem involves real-world data sets that are very large. To get solutions in determining routes which are realistic and very close to the optimal solution, one has to use heuristics and meta-heuristics. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a GA based meta-heuristic to solve the time dependent vehicle route problem with time windows (TDVRPTW). This algorithm is compared with five other existing algorithms in terms of minimizing the number of vehicles used as well as the total distance travelled. The algorithms are implemented using Matlab and HeuristicLab optimization software. A plugin was developed using Visual C# and NET Framework 4.5. Results were tested using Solomon’s 56 benchmark instances (of which 24 instances are used with 4 in each of the 6 problem classes) classified into groups such as C1, C2, R1, R2, RC1, and RC2. For each of the performance measures, through a complete factorial experiment with two factors, it is proved that the proposed algorithm is the best among all the six algorithms compared in this paper.
Highlights
Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most important topics in operations research
According to Sivasankaran and Shahabudeen [45], the fitness function of the chromosome is obtained by assigning the nodes serially from left to right from its ordered vector into customer IDs or nodes for a given travel route
3) Every chromosome is initialized as nodes which contain the source location and the destination location, which are fixed at the start and end of the array
Summary
Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most important topics in operations research. From this figure, one can note that the vehicles originate at the depot, visit all the nodes once, fulfill their demands at the nodes and return to the depot once again. The nodes can be either supplier sites in the case of ecommerce company supplier site pickups or customer sites where the ecommerce company delivers to the customer sites. It can be different manufacturers to whom the suppliers deliver raw materials, components, parts and other supplies of items. The various colours depicted in the figure represent the various routes of the vehicles to fulfill the customer demand
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