A comparison of acceptance criteria for the daily car-pooling problem

Abstract

Previous work on the Daily Car-Pooling problem includes an algorithm that consists of greedy assignment alternating with random perturbation. In this study, we examine the effect of varying the move acceptance policy, specifically Late-acceptance criteria with and without reheating. Late acceptance-based move acceptance criteria were chosen because there is strong empirical evidence in the literature indicating their superiority. Late-acceptance compares the objective values of the current solution with one which was obtained at a fixed number of steps prior to the current step during the search process in order to make an acceptance decision. We observe that the Late-acceptance criteria also achieve superior results in over 75 % of cases for the Daily Car-Pooling problem, the majority of these results being statistically significant. © 2013 Springer-Verlag London.