Autonomous Distributed Genetic Approach for Route Planning Problems

We consider the pickup and delivery problem with time windows as a general model of the practical transportation problems in automated guided vehicle systems, logistic systems, etc. The problem requires that any paired pickup and delivery locations have to be served by one vehicle and the pickup location has to be scheduled before the corresponding delivery location in the route. In this paper, to search a set of routes close to the optimal one, we propose the autonomous distributed genetic approach based on the search space decomposition for the problem. In this approach, first, the search space is divided into sub-spaces based on the number of customers loaded in each vehicle. Then, GA is applied in each sub-space. In addition, the dynamic separation is applied for an efficient search. The effectiveness of the search space decomposition is evaluated by computational experiments