From single-objective to multi-objective vehicle routing problems: motivations, case studies, and methods. (English) Zbl 1187.90056

Jozefowiez, Nicolas; Semet, Frédéric; Talbi, El-Ghazali

Golden, Bruce (ed.) et al., The vehicle routing problem. Latest advances and new challenges. New York, NY: Springer (ISBN 978-0-387-77777-1/hbk). Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series 43, 445-471 (2008).

Summary: Multi-objective optimization knows a fast growing interest for both academic researches and real-life problems. An important domain is the one of vehicle routing problems. In this chapter, we present the possible motivations for applying multi-objective optimization on vehicle routing problems and the potential uses and benefits of doing so. To illustrate this fact, we also describe two problems, namely the vehicle routing problem with route balancing and the bi-objective covering tour problem. We also propose a two-phased approach based on the combination of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and single-objective techniques that respectively provide diversification and intensification for the search in the objective space. Examples of implementation of this method are provided on the two problems.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1142.90004].

MSC:

90B06	Transportation, logistics and supply chain management
90C35	Programming involving graphs or networks
90C29	Multi-objective and goal programming
90C59	Approximation methods and heuristics in mathematical programming

Keywords:

vehicle routing problems; multi-objective optimization; cooperation; metaheuristics; parallelization