A vehicle routing problem solved by agents

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to find out a good solution to the vehicle routing problem considering heterogeneous vehicles. This problem tries to solve the generation of paths and the assignment of buses on these routes. The objective of this problem is to minimize the number of vehicles required and to maximize the number of demands transported. This paper considers a Memetic Algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet for any transport problem between many origins and many destinations. A Memetic Algorithm always maintains a population of different solutions to the problem, each of which operates as an agent. These agents interact between themselves within a framework of competition and cooperation. Extensive computational tests on some instances taken from the literature reveal the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.