1. Two-stage heuristic algorithm for multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows.
- Author
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YU Bin, JIN Peng-huan, and YANG Zhong-zhen
- Subjects
- *
VEHICLE routing problem , *COMBINATORIAL optimization , *ALGORITHMS , *HEURISTIC algorithms , *MATHEMATICAL optimization - Abstract
Vehicle routing problem (VRP) plays a vital role in logistics research. The multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows (MDVRPTW), an extension of VRP with time windows (VRPTW), is very complicated to be solved. This paper presented a two-stage heuristic to solve MDVRPTW. In the two-stage heuristic, aggregation-based clustering algorithm was firstly proposed to transfer MDVRPTW to several VRPTWs, and ant colony optimization (ACO) was developed to optimize each VRPTW. Two improvement strategies: crossover operation and adaptive ant-weight strategy, are designed to improve ACO. The performance of the two-stage heuristic was examined by use of some classic instances. Results show that the two-stage heuristic is a powerful tool for MDVRPTW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012