Solving the dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem using genetic algorithms

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is an important problem occurring in many logistics systems. The objective of VRP is to serve a set of customers at minimum cost, such that every node is visited by exactly one vehicle only once. In this paper, we consider the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) which new customer demands are received along the day. Hence, they must be serviced at their locations by a set of vehicles in real time minimizing the total travel distance. The main goal of this research is to find a solution of DVRP using genetic algorithm. However we used some heuristics in addition during generation of the initial population and crossover for tuning the system to obtain better result. The computational experiments were applied to 22 benchmarks instances with up to 385 customers and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by comparing the computational results with those previously presented in the literature.