Localized Genetic Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

This book identifies some problems, the genetic algorithm GA is facing in the area of vehicle routing problem VRP and proposes various methods to address those problems. Those problems arise from unavailability of suitable chromosomal representation and evaluation schemes of the GA for the VRP. They have problems of high computational cost, illegal chromosomes and wrong fitness assignment. These problems are addressed by several new proposed schemes namely Self Imposed Constraints evaluation scheme, Contour and Reverse Contour evaluation scheme and Order Skiping evaluation scheme, which are specifically tailored for various problems, objectives and situations. Apart from this Localized Optimization Framework is introduced,which standardizes divide and conquer strategies. Genetic Algorithm is used in this framework to be called as Localized Genetic Algorithm. Lastly, a standard unit for computational comparison i.e., Bellman''s Evaluation Units BEUs, is also introduced to facilitate computational comparisons for future researchers. Furthermore computational complexity estimation is also modelled to estimate computational time without actual experimentation.