Genetic algorithm for solving a dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows

摘要

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) introduced by Dantzing and Ranser (1959) is a prominent combinatorial optimization problem. Over the last several decades, many variants of the multi-constrained vehicle routing problem have been studied and a class of problems known as rich vehicle routing problem (RVRPs), has been formed. This work is about solving a variant of RVRP with dynamically changing orders and time windows constraints. In the real world application, during the working day, new orders often occur dynamically and need to be integrated into the routes planing. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) with a simple heuristic is proposed to solve the dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows. The performance is tested on Solomon's benchmark with different percentage of the orders revealed to the algorithm during operation time.