A New Method for Generating Initial Solutions of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems

Year 2018, Volume: 31 Issue: 2, 489 - 513, 01.06.2018

Kenan Karagül , Michael G. Kay , Sezai Tokat

Abstract

In vehicle routing problems, the initial solutions of
the routes are important for improving the quality and solution time of the
algorithm. For a better route construction algorithm, the obtained initial
solutions must be basic, fast, and flexible with reasonable accuracy. In this
study, initial solutions improvement for CVRP is introduced based on a method that
is introduced in the literature. Using a different formula for addressing the
gravitational forces, a new method is introduced and compared with the previous
physics inspired algorithm. By using the initial solutions of the proposed
method and using them as RTR and SA initial routes, it is seen that better
results are obtained when compared with various algorithms from the literature.
Also, in order to fairly compare the algorithms executed on different machines,
a new comparison scale for the solution quality of vehicle routing problems is
proposed that depends on the solution time and the deviation from the best
known solution. The obtained initial solutions are then input to Record-to-Record
and Simulated Annealing algorithms to obtain final solutions. Various test
instances and CVRP solutions from the literature are used for comparison. The
comparisons with the proposed method have shown promising results.

Keywords

Constructive Routing Heuristics, Vehicle Routing Problem, Initial Routing Solutions, Physics-Inspired Optimization, Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

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