A solution for the bi-objective vehicle routing problem with the windows using local search and genetic algorithms

Abstract

This paper deals with the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW routes a set of vehicles to service customers having two-sided time windows, i.e. earliest and latest start of service times. The demand requests are served by capacitated vehicles with limited travel times to return to the depot. The purpose of this paper is to develop a hybrid algorithm that uses the modified push forward insertion heuristic (MPFIH), a λ-interchange local search descent method (λ-LSD) and a genetic algorithm to solve the VRPTW with two objectives. The first objective aims to determine the minimum number of vehicles required and the second is to find the solution that minimizes the total travel time. A set of well-known benchmark problems are used to compare the quality of solutions. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides effective solutions compared with best found solutions and better than another heuristic used for comparison.