Comparison of similarity measures for the multi-objective vehicle routing problem with time windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem can be seen as a fusion of two well known combinatorial problems, the Travelling Salesman Problem and Bin Packing Problem. It has several variants, the one with Time Windows being the case of study in this paper. Its main objective is to find the lowest-distance set of routes to deliver goods to customers, which have service time windows, using a fleet of identical vehicles with restricted capacity. We consider the simultaneous minimisation of the number of routes along with the total travel distance. Although previous research has considered evolutionary methods for solving this problem, none of them has concentrated on the similarity of solutions. We analyse here two methods to measure similarity, which are incorporated into an evolutionary algorithm to solve the multi-objective problem. We have applied this algorithm to a publicly available set of benchmark instances, and when these similarity measures are considered, our solutions are seen to be compe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Abel Garcia-Najera, John A. Bullinaria
• Keywords: Bin Packing Problem, GECCO 2009, Optimization, Travelling Salesman Problem, Vehicle Routing Problem