Solving Real-World Vehicle Routing Problems with Evolutionary Algorithms

Authors

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the freight transportation planning component of the in.west project. This system uses an Evolutionary Algorithm with intelligent search operations in order to achieve a high utilization of resources and a minimization of the distance travelled by freight carriers in real-world scenarios. We test our planner rigorously with real-world data and obtain substantial improvements when compared to the original freight plans. Additionally, different settings for the Evolutionary Algorithm are studied with further experiments and their utility is verified with statistical tests.

Keywords

Vehicle Routing Problems, VRP, Evolutionary Algorithms, EAs, Genetic Representation

BibTeX

@incollection{WPG2009SRWVRPWEA,
  author                    = {Thomas Weise and Alexander Podlich and Christian Gorldt},
  title                     = {{Solving Real-World Vehicle Routing Problems with Evolutionary Algorithms}},
  booktitle                 = {Natural Intelligence for Scheduling, Planning and Packing Problems},
  editor                    = {Raymond Chiong and Sandeep Dhakal},
  publisher                 = {{Springer-Verlag: {Berlin/Heidelberg}}},
  series                    = {Studies in Computational Intelligence},
  volume                    = {250},
  chapter                   = {2},
  pages                     = {29--53},
  year                      = {2009},
  url                       = {http://www.it-weise.de/documents/files/WPG2009SRWVRPWEA.pdf},
  doi                       = {10.1007/978-3-642-04039-9_2},
  key                       = {WPG2009SRWVRPWEA},
},

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