Enhanced Genetic Algorithm Optimization Models for Vehicular Routing Problems

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most studied combinatorial optimization problems because of its practical relevance and complexity. Though there are several techniques have been proposed to solve the VRPs and its variants effectively, each technique has its own tradeoff values in terms of the performance factors. From this perspective, the work presented in this paper proposed an intelligent routing strategy for VRP based on distance values between the cities. The proposed strategy uses an enhanced model of Genetic Algorithm to find the optimal tour paths among the cities under distance based optimized tour path estimation scenarios. For distance-based optimization approach, experiments were performed on the standard benchmark TSP instances obtained from TSPLIB. A set of fine-grained result analyses demonstrated that the proposed model of routing strategies performed comparatively better w.r.t. the existing relevant approaches. By considering this problem as the base, a distinct model was developed as a set of assistive modules for Genetic Algorithms (GA), which are aimed at improving the overall efficiency of the typical GA, particularly for optimization problems. The capability of the proposed optimization models for VRP is demonstrated at various levels, particularly at the population initialization stage, using a set of well-defined experiments.