A comparison of recombination operators for capacitate vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) deals with the assignment of a set of transportation orders to a fleet of vehicles, and the sequencing of stops for each vehicle to minimize transportation costs. In this paper we study the Capacitated VRP (CVRP), which is mainly characterized by using vehicles of the same capacity. Taking a basic GA to solve the CVRP, we propose a new problem dependent recombination operator, called Best Route Better Adjustment recombination (BRBAX). A comparison of its performance is carried out with respect to other two classical recombination operators. Also we conduct a study of different mutations in order to determine the best combination of genetic operators for this problem. The results show that the use of our specialized BRBAX recombination outperforms the others more generic on all problem instances used in this work for all the metrics tested.