Evolving schedule graphs for the vehicle routing problem with timewindows

摘要

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a veryimportant problem in the transportation industry since it occursfrequently in everyday practice, e.g. in scheduling bank deliveries.Many heuristic algorithms have been proposed for this NP-hard problem.This paper reports the successful application of GrEVeRT (Graph-basedEvolutionary algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Timewindows), an evolutionary algorithm based on a directed acyclic graphmodel. On well-known benchmark instances of the VRPTW, we obtain betterresults than those reported by other researchers using geneticalgorithms