Distributed Metaheuristic Solution Based on Solution Space Decomposition for Route Planning Problems

Abstract

We propose a distributed meta heuristic method to a class of transportation problem. The proposed method is based on the solution space decomposition and meta heuristics are applied on each decomposed space. In this paper, a pickup and delivery problem with time windows is dealt with as one of the practical and complicated transportation problems. This problem requires that any paired pickup and delivery locations have to be served by one vehicle and the pickup location has to be scheduled before the corresponding delivery location in the route. In designing our method, the solution space is divided into sub-spaces based on the number of customers loaded on each vehicle and then, each sub-space is solved by simulated annealing algorithms. In addition, we introduce genetic algorithms to choose appropriate sub-spaces for applying the simulated annealing method. The effectiveness and the potential of the proposed approach are evaluated by computational experiments.