Hybrid loading situation vehicle routing problem in the context of agricultural harvesting: A reconstructed MOEA/D with parallel populations

Abstract

With the increasing level of agricultural automation, the combination of agriculture and intelligent vehicle technology is propelling the development of smart agriculture. Although this technology has already been applied widely for various agricultural production tasks, inefficient vehicle scheduling still hasn't been resolved satisfactorily. Oriented towards agricultural harvesting scenarios, a hybrid loading situation vehicle routing problem (HLSVRP) model is proposed to minimize total energy consumption and maximum completion time. A reconstructed multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (R-MOEA/D) is developed to solve the problem. Eight solution representations tailored specifically to the problem are introduced by R-MOEA/D, allowing an extensive exploration of the solution space. A modified Clarke & Wright (MCW) heuristic is designed to generate a high-quality initial population. A novel problem-specific parallel population updating mechanism based on the four crossover and two mutation combinations is also provided to improve the exploration ability. A collaborative search strategy is employed to facilitate cooperation among parallel populations. Finally, a series of comparative experiments conducted on various task scales and vehicle scales verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithmic components and the exceptional performance for solving HLSVRP.