Multi-parent insertion crossover for vehicle routing problem with time windows

Multi parent crossover has been successfully applied to solve many combinatorial optimization problems such as unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem (UBQP). This because using more than two parents has increased the intensification process by exploiting the information shared by multi parents. However not all type of crossovers are suitable to solve vehicle routing problem (VRP). Therefore, this work introduces a multi parent insertion crossover in solving vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) by enhancing two parent insertion crossovers. This crossover exchange information among three parents instead of two. Result tested on Solomon VRPTW benchmarks demonstrate that multi parent crossover outperformed two parent crossover on same instances. This prove the effectiveness of having more parents for crossover that can be help the search to find better quality solution.