Browsing by Subject "Real-world application"

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Tackling the rich vehicle routing problem with nature-inspired algorithms
(2022) Lesch, Veronika; König, Maximilian; Kounev, Samuel; Stein, Anthony; Krupitzer, Christian; Lesch, Veronika; University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany; König, Maximilian; PASS Logistics Solutions AG, Aschaffenburg, Germany; Kounev, Samuel; University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany; Stein, Anthony; University of Hohenheim, Hohenheim, Germany; Krupitzer, Christian; University of Hohenheim, Hohenheim, Germany
In the last decades, the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), i.e., assigning a set of orders to vehicles and planning their routes has been intensively researched. As only the assignment of order to vehicles and their routes is already an NP-complete problem, the application of these algorithms in practice often fails to take into account the constraints and restrictions that apply in real-world applications, the so called rich VRP (rVRP) and are limited to single aspects. In this work, we incorporate the main relevant real-world constraints and requirements. We propose a two-stage strategy and a Timeline algorithm for time windows and pause times, and apply a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) individually to the problem to find optimal solutions. Our evaluation of eight different problem instances against four state-of-the-art algorithms shows that our approach handles all given constraints in a reasonable time.