Title: A Particle Swarm Optimisation for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Authors: The Jin Ai, Voratas Kachitvichyanukul

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, Jl. Babarsari 43, Yogyakarta 55281, Indonesia. ' School of Engineering and Technology, Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang, Pathumtani 12120, Thailand

Abstract: A heuristic based on Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) algorithm for solving VRPTW, which is an extension of PSO application for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) (Ai and Kachitvichyanukul, 2007), is presented in this paper. A computational experiment is carried out by running the proposed algorithm with the VRPTW benchmark data set of Solomon (1987). The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to provide VRPTW solutions that are very close to its optimal solutions for problems with 25 and 50 customers within reasonably short of computational time.

Keywords: PSO; particle swarm optimisation; VRPTW; vehicle routing problem; time windows; heuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2009.027156

International Journal of Operational Research, 2009 Vol.6 No.4, pp.519 - 537

Published online: 16 Jul 2009 *

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