A meta-heuristic applied for a topologic pickup and delivery problem with time windows constraints

Abstract

Our problem is about a routing of a vehicle with product pickup and delivery and with time window constraints. This problem requires to be attended with instances of medium scale (nodes ≥ 100). A strong active time window exists (≥ 90%) with a large factor of amplitude (≥ 75%). This problem is NP-hard and for such motive the application of an exact method is limited by the computational time. This paper proposes a specialized genetic algorithm. We report good solutions in computational times below 5 minutes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.