Hybrid Solution Methodology: Heuristic-Metaheuristic-Implicit Enumeration 1-0 for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (Cvrp)

David Escobar,Antonio Escobar,Ramón A

doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2016.070338

Abstract

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem that has been intensively studied in the last few decades. We present a hybrid methodology approach to solve this problem which incorporates an improvement stage by using a 1-0 implicit enumeration technique or Balas’s method. Other distinguishing features of the methodology proposed include a specially designed route-based crossover operator for solution recombination and an effective local procedure as the mutation step. Finally, the methodology is tested with instances of the specialized literature and compared with its best-known solutions for the CVRP with homogeneous fleet, to be able to identify the efficiency of the use of the Balas’s methodology in routing problems.

Highlights

The general vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a generic name that refers to a variety of applied problems in various areas of knowledge such as transportation, supply chain, production planning, and telecommunications
Looking at the state of the problem, it is remarkable that the the large increase in algorithmic and methodical development focused on the variants of the VRP, such as the capacitated routing problem (CVRP) and the VRP with time windows (VRPTW), which highlights the techniques with better behavior for each of these variants
A modified genetic algorithm of ChuBeasley [23], [24], [25] is proposed, and combined with a set of heuristics and exact techniques which would enable the algorithm to find solutions to the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) using the variant that works with homogeneous fleet and an unlimited number of vehicles

Summary

Introduction

The general vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a generic name that refers to a variety of applied problems in various areas of knowledge such as transportation, supply chain, production planning, and telecommunications. The general problem is based on a group of customers that have to be served by a fleet of vehicles They begin their tour or path in a main depot, visiting the customers assigned to the route only once, and returning to the depot where they started. The simplicity of the description is not near to the complexity of the solution search, that is classified as an NP-hard problem and ranked as one of the most interesting optimization problems in operational research This problem has been analysed and studied extensively since its first appearance in the literature through the formulation applied to the fuel distribution by Ramser and Dantzig in 1959 [1]. The importance of the guidelines proposed in the literature were an important pillar in defining the methodology that would allow us to work on the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP).

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Conclusion