Vehicle Routing Problem Using Parallel Genetic Algorithm

Vehicle routing problem(VRP) is known to be NP-hard problem, and good heuristic algorithm needs to be developed. To develop a heuristic algorithm for the VRP, this study suggests a parallel genetic algorithm(PGA), which determines each vehicle route in order to minimize the transportation costs. The PGA developed in this study uses two dimensional array chromosomes, which rows represent each vehicle route. The PGA uses new genetic operators. New mutation operator is composed of internal and external operators. internal mutation swaps customer locations within a vehicle routing, and external mutation swaps customer locations between vehicles. Ten problems were solved using this algorithm and showed good results in a relatively short time.