Self-organizing maps in evolutionary approach for the traveling salesman problem and vehicle routing problem with time windows

Abstract

The article presents the memetic SOM, an evolutionary algorithm embedding selforganizing maps as operators to address the Euclidean traveling salesman problem (TSP) and a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). We show that the approach competes with other neural network applications on the TSP, with respect to solution quality. Then, we show that it allows extending the self-organizing map to deal with a version of the vehicle routing problem with time windows where the number of vehicles is an input, and by adding some walking distance from customers to bus stops.