A memetic algorithm for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows using selective route exchange crossover

Abstract

The pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDP TW) is a variant of the vehicle routing problem. In this paper, we present an memetic algorithm (MA) for the PDPTW. Particular attention is paid to the design of the crossover because it is usually very hard to design an effective crossover operator for tightly constrained problems such as the PDPTW. Experimental results on Li and Lim's benchmarks demonstrate that our MA is competitive with existing approaches and improves 146 best-known solutions out of 298 instances. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.