GIDEON: a genetic algorithm system for vehicle routing with time windows

Author

Thangiah, Sam R. ; Nygard, Kendall E. ; Juell, Paul L.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., North Dakota State Univ., Fargo, ND, USA

fYear

1991

Firstpage

322

Lastpage

328

Abstract

Addresses the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW involves routing a fleet of vehicles, of limited capacity and travel time, from a central depot to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands within specified time windows. The authors describe GIDEON, a genetic algorithm system to heuristically solve the VRPTW. GIDEON consists of two distinct modules: a global clustering module that assigns customers to vehicles by a process called genetic sectoring (GENSECT) and a local route optimization module (SWITCH-OPT). On a standard set of 56 VRPTW problems obtained from the literature, GIDEON did better than the alternate methods on 41 of them, with an average reduction of 3.9% in fleet size and 4.4% in distance traveled for the 56 problems. GIDEON took an average of 127 CPU seconds to solve a problem on the Solbourne 5/802 computer

Keywords

distributive data processing; genetic algorithms; heuristic programming; transportation; 127 s; GENSECT; GIDEON; SWITCH-OPT; Solbourne 5/802 computer; central depot; fleet size; genetic algorithm system; genetic sectoring; geographically dispersed customers; global clustering module; heuristic solution; local route optimization module; time windows; travel time; vehicle routing; Artificial intelligence; Computer science; Costs; Decision making; Dynamic scheduling; Genetic algorithms; Job shop scheduling; Operations research; Routing; Vehicle dynamics;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Artificial Intelligence Applications, 1991. Proceedings., Seventh IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Miami Beach, FL

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2135-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CAIA.1991.120888

Filename

120888