Virus Evolution Strategy for Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows.

This paper proposes a new solution to the vehicle routing problem with time windows using an evolution strategy adopting viral infection. The problem belongs to the NP-hard class and is very difficult to solve within practical time limits using systematic optimization techniques. In conventional evolution strategies, a schema with a high degree-of-fitness produced in the process of evolution may not be inherited when the fitness of the individual containing the schema is low. The proposed method preserves the schema as a virus and uses it by the infection operation in successive generations. Experimental results using extended Solomon΄s benchmark problems with 1000 customers proved that the proposed method is superior to conventional methods in both its rates of searches and the probability of obtaining solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]