The Vehicle Routing Problem Tackled By Genetic Algorithm

Many organisations face the problem of delivering goods from a warehouse to a number of retail sites using a fleet of vehicles. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is mathematical model that closely approximates the problem faced by many of these organisations. While VRP can be solved exactly by various techniques, the time required is often excessive as the problem is NP-hard. In this paper we propose genetic algorithm based heuristic in conjunction with some handy techniques to solve the basic Vehicle Routing Problem. The proposed approach has been tested on several test problems, and the result reveal that the developed heurisitic finds high quality solutions in a resonable amount of computer time. Also the influence of the respective control parameters (population size, mutation, bias,..) were examined, and their impacts on the optimisation procedure are presented.