An Efficient Metaheuristic Algorithm for Solving Soft-clustered Vehicle Routing Problems

Yawen Kou, Yangming Zhou, Mengchu Zhou

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

A soft-clustered vehicle routing problem (SoftClu-VRP) is an important variant of the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem, where customers are partitioned into clusters and all customers of the same cluster must be served by the same vehicle. As a highly useful model for parcel delivery in courier companies, SoftCluVRP is NP-hard. In this work, we propose an efficient metaheuristic algorithm for solving it. Starting from an initial population, it iterates by using a solution recombination operator (to generate a promising offspring solution), a hybrid neighborhood search (to find a high-quality local optimum), and a population updating strategy (to manage a healthy population). Experiments on two groups of 378 widely-used benchmark instances show that it achieves highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. In particular, our algorithm finds the best upper bounds on 320 instances.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICNSC 2022 - Proceedings of 2022 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control
Subtitle of host publicationAutonomous Intelligent Systems
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781665472432
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event19th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, ICNSC 2022 - Shanghai, China
Duration: Dec 15 2022Dec 18 2022

Publication series

NameICNSC 2022 - Proceedings of 2022 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control: Autonomous Intelligent Systems

Conference

Conference19th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, ICNSC 2022
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period12/15/2212/18/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Optimization

Keywords

  • Combinatorial Optimization
  • Evolutionary Computation
  • Metaheuristic
  • Vehicle Routing Problem

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