Configuring an evolutionary tool for the inventory and transportation problem

EVITA, standing for Evolutionary Inventory and Transportation Algorithm, aims to be a commercial tool to address the problem of minimising both the transport and inventory costs of a retail chain that is supplied from a central warehouse. In this paper we study different issues involved in finding the appropriate settings for EVITA, so that it can be employed by a non-expert user over wide range of problems. The aim is not to define a new algorithm for resolution of the ITP, but to determine whether it is possible to find a set of input parameters that can provide good results on a wide range of problem configurations, hence eliminating the need for user adjustment once the tool is employed in a commercial setting. We focus on the influence of three parameters: the population size, the tournament size and the mutation probability. After extensive experimentation and statistical analysis we are able to find a good configuration for the three factors. Categories and Subject Descriptors:...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Anna Esparcia-Alcázar, Lidia Lluch-Revert, Manuel Cardós, Ken Sharman, Juan Julián Merelo Guervós
• Keywords: Evolutionary Inventory, GECCO 2007, Optimization, Transportation Algorithm, Wide Range