| Article ID: | iaor2005947 |
| Country: | China |
| Volume: | 21 |
| Issue: | 6 |
| Start Page Number: | 12 |
| End Page Number: | 15 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 2003 |
| Journal: | Systems Engineering |
| Authors: | Bin Song, Fu Zhuo |
| Keywords: | heuristics |
The vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (VRPSTW) is a variation of the vehicle routing problem (VRP), which is a typical NP-hard problem. In this paper, we describe an improved genetic algorithm for the VRPSTW, in which a new coding method, the adaptive mechanism of crossover and mutation, and penalty function are introduced. Computational results on a set of benchmark problems show that the procedure is efficient.