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Open Access

Solving Multi-Objective Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows: A Decomposition-Based Multiform Optimization Approach

College of Computer Science and Technology, Huaqiao University, and Xiamen Key Laboratory of Data Security and Blockchain Technology, Xiamen 361021, China
College of Engineering, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou 362000, China
School of Computer Sciences, Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, Shenzhen 518000, China
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Abstract

In solving multi-objective vehicle routing problems with time windows (MOVRPTW), most existing algorithms focus on the optimization of a single problem formulation. However, little effort has been devoted to exploiting valuable knowledge from the alternate formulations of MOVRPTW for better optimization performance. Aiming at this insufficiency, this study proposes a decomposition-based multi-objective multiform evolutionary algorithm (MMFEA/D), which performs the evolutionary search on multiple alternate formulations of MOVRPTW simultaneously to complement each other. In particular, the main characteristics of MMFEA/D are three folds. First, a multiform construction (MFC) strategy is adopted to construct multiple alternate formulations, each of which is formulated by grouping several adjacent subproblems based on the decomposition of MOVRPTW. Second, a transfer reproduction (TFR) mechanism is designed to generate offspring for each formulation via transferring promising solutions from other formulations, making that the useful traits captured from different formulations can be shared and leveraged to guide the evolutionary search. Third, an adaptive local search (ALS) strategy is developed to invest search effort on different alternate formulations as per their usefulness for MOVRPTW, thus facilitating the efficient allocation of computational resources. Experimental studies have demonstrated the superior performance of MMFEA/D on the classical Solomon instances and the real-world instances.

Keywords

MOVRPTWmultiform optimizationmultiform constructionknowledge transferadaptive local search

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Tsinghua Science and Technology
Volume 29 Issue 2,
April 2024
Pages 305-324
DOI: 10.26599/TST.2023.9010048
Cite this article:
Cai Y, Lin Z, Cheng M, et al. Solving Multi-Objective Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows: A Decomposition-Based Multiform Optimization Approach. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2024, 29(2): 305-324. https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010048

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Received: 31 January 2023
Revised: 08 May 2023
Accepted: 25 May 2023
Published: 22 September 2023
© The author(s) 2024.

The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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