Solving Vehicle Routing Problem for Maintaining and Repairing Medical Equipment Using Differential Evolution Algorithm: A Case Study in Ubon Ratchathani Public Health Office

摘要

This research is to present the solution of the vehicle routing problem for maintaining and repairing medical equipment in Thailand. We take the health promoting hospitals in Ubon Ratchathani as our case study because there is a continuous medical equipment maintenance and repair service. Also, the service team can take a break at the set spots without coming back to the starting point because coming back to where the team started may have a more expensive cost than staying at the set spots nearby. We use time taken in traveling and repairing as a condition. Under this condition, we have VRP - CTST, which is more effective. We use improved differential evolution algorithms for testing our study case in order to find the optimal solution and to compare with classical differential evolution algorithms. We found that the improved differential evolution algorithms give a better solution than the classical differential evolution algorithms, and when compared with the best practice, we can reduce the traveling cost by 52.24%.