A penalty-based edge assembly memetic algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows

  • Authors:

  • Yuichi Nagata;Olli Bräysy;Wout Dullaert

  • Affiliations:

  • Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259 Nagatsuta Midori-ku Yokohama, Kanagawa 226-8502, Japan;Agora Innoroad Laboratory, Agora Center, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland;Institute of Transport and Maritime Management Antwerp, University of Antwerp, Keizerstraat 64, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium and Antwerp Maritime Academy, Noordkasteel Oost 6, 2030 Antwerp, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Operations Research
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this paper, we present an effective memetic algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The paper builds upon an existing edge assembly crossover (EAX) developed for the capacitated VRP. The adjustments of the EAX operator and the introduction of a novel penalty function to eliminate violations of the time window constraint as well as the capacity constraint from offspring solutions generated by the EAX operator have proven essential to the heuristic's performance. Experimental results on Solomon's and Gehring and Homberger benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms previous approaches and is able to improve 184 best-known solutions out of 356 instances.