A SPANNING TREE-BASED PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR TRANSPORTATION PROBLEMS WITH EXCLUSIONARY SIDE CONSTRAINTS

摘要

Transportation Problem is of crucial importance in today's industries, accounting for a significant portion of many distribution and transportation systems. One kind of this problem is known as the transportation problem with exclusionary side constraint (escTP), which is one of nonlinear programming models. It is hard to solve this problem with traditional linear programming method. In this paper, we present a computational-efficient method of particle swarm optimization algorithm based on spanning tree (st-PSO) to solve this kind of nonlinear transportation problem. The Prü fer number is adopted to represent the candidate solution to the problem and an improved decoding procedure is proposed. We discuss the adaption and implementation of the PSO search strategy to escTP and provide numerical experiments to show the effectiveness of the heuristic. Experimental results indicate that the new st-PSO algorithm can effectively and quickly get optimal solution of escTP.