Genetic programming for electric vehicle routing problem with soft time windows
Francisco Javier Gil-Gala, Marko Ðurasević, Domagoj Jakobović
Abstract
Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) that model transport processes have been intensively studied. Due to environmental concerns, the electric VRP (EVRP), which uses only electric vehicles, has recently attracted more attention. In many cases, such problems need to be solved in a short time, either due to their complexity or because of their dynamic nature. Routing policies (RPs), simple heuristics that build the solution incrementally, are a suitable choice to solve these problems. However, it is difficult to design efficient RPs manually. Therefore, in this paper, we consider the application of genetic programming (GP) to automatically generate new RPs. For this purpose, three RP variants and several domain-specific terminal nodes are defined to optimise three criteria. The results show that GP is able to automatically designed RPs perform, and it finds RPs with good generalisation properties that can effectively solve unseen problems.