A single-phase method based on evolution calculation for vehicle routing problem

This paper is concerned with a transportation system in which vehicles deliver a piece of luggage to customers distributed on a service area. An important problem of operating such a system is to determine an assignment of the luggage into each vehicle. Problem to obtain the assignment is called vehicle routing problem (VRP) and it is one of hard combinatorial optimization problems. And VRP is characterized with two properties, geometrical and time structures. The main purpose of this work is to propose an evolution calculation method for VRP. In the method, four search operators that utilize geometrical and time structures are introduced. Numerical experiments for an actual system are presented to examine the method.