Article ID: | iaor201525574 |
Volume: | 21 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 433 |
End Page Number: | 450 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2014 |
Journal: | International Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Euchi Jalel |
Keywords: | combinatorial optimization |
In this paper, we consider a variant of vehicle routing problem with multiple trip and time windows. In this alternative problem, we think about the scheduling of trucks to a number of customers in the presence of fixed fleet and time windows constraints. This type of problem can be described as determining a number of vehicle trips minimising total travelled distance complying with the time windows and the multiple use of vehicles. We call this problem a multiple trips fixed fleet vehicle routing problems with time windows (MTFFVRPTW). To solve this variant, a new hybrid evolutionary algorithm for transport optimisation problems, called estimation of distribution algorithm with local search is used. The proposed algorithm integrates a double structure of distribution technique, which is used to introduce the variables dependency. To evaluate our approach we provide a number of experimentation to a modified Solomon's instances for the case of multiple trips. The results show that the hybrid proposed algorithm offer a good quality solution in the term of objective functions, also in the running time.