Experimental Analysis of Metaheuristic Algorithms for the VRPTW

Abstract

A general methodology to evaluate heuristic performance on VRP problems is still missing. Only a small number of papers have made notion of using either design of experiment techniques or statistical tools for exploring data and testing hypotheses. Current VRP research can make a signi cant methodological progress by applying a statistical approach to obtain a more rigorous evaluation and gain a more complete insight in and understanding of the diff erent results. This research aims at developing such a methodological framework and to gain insight and understanding of how performance is a ffected by the addition of a component or by changing a parameter to another level, which combinations of parameter values and heuristic components perform well or not and how the problem characteristics in fluence this relationship with performance.