989 research outputs found
On green routing and scheduling problem
The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much
interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing
literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental
issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have
been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization
tools
Workload Equity in Vehicle Routing Problems: A Survey and Analysis
Over the past two decades, equity aspects have been considered in a growing
number of models and methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Equity
concerns most often relate to fairly allocating workloads and to balancing the
utilization of resources, and many practical applications have been reported in
the literature. However, there has been only limited discussion about how
workload equity should be modeled in VRPs, and various measures for optimizing
such objectives have been proposed and implemented without a critical
evaluation of their respective merits and consequences.
This article addresses this gap with an analysis of classical and alternative
equity functions for biobjective VRP models. In our survey, we review and
categorize the existing literature on equitable VRPs. In the analysis, we
identify a set of axiomatic properties that an ideal equity measure should
satisfy, collect six common measures, and point out important connections
between their properties and those of the resulting Pareto-optimal solutions.
To gauge the extent of these implications, we also conduct a numerical study on
small biobjective VRP instances solvable to optimality. Our study reveals two
undesirable consequences when optimizing equity with nonmonotonic functions:
Pareto-optimal solutions can consist of non-TSP-optimal tours, and even if all
tours are TSP optimal, Pareto-optimal solutions can be workload inconsistent,
i.e. composed of tours whose workloads are all equal to or longer than those of
other Pareto-optimal solutions. We show that the extent of these phenomena
should not be underestimated. The results of our biobjective analysis are valid
also for weighted sum, constraint-based, or single-objective models. Based on
this analysis, we conclude that monotonic equity functions are more appropriate
for certain types of VRP models, and suggest promising avenues for further
research.Comment: Accepted Manuscrip
Grammatical evolution hyper-heuristic for combinatorial optimization problems
Designing generic problem solvers that perform well across a diverse set of problems is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a hyper-heuristic framework to automatically generate an effective and generic solution method by utilizing grammatical evolution. In the proposed framework, grammatical evolution is used as an online solver builder, which takes several heuristic components (e.g., different acceptance criteria and different neighborhood structures) as inputs and evolves templates of perturbation heuristics. The evolved templates are improvement heuristics, which represent a complete search method to solve the problem at hand. To test the generality and the performance of the proposed method, we consider two well-known combinatorial optimization problems: exam timetabling (Carter and ITC 2007 instances) and the capacitated vehicle routing problem (Christofides and Golden instances). We demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive, if not superior, when compared to state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics, as well as bespoke methods for these different problem domains. In order to further improve the performance of the proposed framework we utilize an adaptive memory mechanism, which contains a collection of both high quality and diverse solutions and is updated during the problem solving process. Experimental results show that the grammatical evolution hyper-heuristic, with an adaptive memory, performs better than the grammatical evolution hyper-heuristic without a memory. The improved framework also outperforms some bespoke methodologies, which have reported best known results for some instances in both problem domains
A large neighbourhood based heuristic for two-echelon routing problems
In this paper, we address two optimisation problems arising in the context of
city logistics and two-level transportation systems. The two-echelon vehicle
routing problem and the two-echelon location routing problem seek to produce
vehicle itineraries to deliver goods to customers, with transits through
intermediate facilities. To efficiently solve these problems, we propose a
hybrid metaheuristic which combines enumerative local searches with
destroy-and-repair principles, as well as some tailored operators to optimise
the selections of intermediate facilities. We conduct extensive computational
experiments to investigate the contribution of these operators to the search
performance, and measure the performance of the method on both problem classes.
The proposed algorithm finds the current best known solutions, or better ones,
for 95% of the two-echelon vehicle routing problem benchmark instances.
Overall, for both problems, it achieves high-quality solutions within short
computing times. Finally, for future reference, we resolve inconsistencies
between different versions of benchmark instances, document their differences,
and provide them all online in a unified format
Order Picking Problem in a Warehouse with Bi-Objective Genetic Algorithm Approach: Case Study
In this paper, an order picking problem with the capacitated forklift in a warehouse is studied by considering the total distance and the penalized earliness/tardiness. These objectives are important to reduce transportation costs and to satisfy customer expectations. Since this problem has been known as NP-hard, a genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to solve the bi-objective order picking problem. The proposed approach is applied to auto components industry that produces wire harnesses responsible for all electrical functions in the vehicle. Experimental design is used for tuning the influential parameters of the proposed GA. The GA approach was solved by weighted sum scalarization.
The stochastic vehicle routing problem : a literature review, part I : models
Building on the work of Gendreau et al. (Eur J Oper Res 88(1):3–12; 1996), we review the past 20 years of scientific literature on stochastic vehicle routing problems. The numerous variants of the problem that have been studied in the literature are described and categorized. Keywords: vehicle routing (VRP), stochastic programming, SVRPpublishedVersio
Routing Unmanned Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments
Most of the routing algorithms for unmanned vehicles, that arise in data
gathering and monitoring applications in the literature, rely on the Global
Positioning System (GPS) information for localization. However, disruption of
GPS signals either intentionally or unintentionally could potentially render
these algorithms not applicable. In this article, we present a novel method to
address this difficulty by combining methods from cooperative localization and
routing. In particular, the article formulates a fundamental combinatorial
optimization problem to plan routes for an unmanned vehicle in a GPS-restricted
environment while enabling localization for the vehicle. We also develop
algorithms to compute optimal paths for the vehicle using the proposed
formulation. Extensive simulation results are also presented to corroborate the
effectiveness and performance of the proposed formulation and algorithms.Comment: Publised in International Conference on Umanned Aerial System
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