A new Electromagnetism-Like Mechanism for solving the vehicle routing problem with time window constraint

Vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that is crucial for transportation and logistics systems. The objective of the VRPTW is serve a number of customers within predefined time windows at minimum cost, without violating the capacity constraint for each vehicle. This problems are best solved by heuristics. EM is a new metaheuristic method and inspired by the attraction and repulsion mechanism of the electromagnetism theory. we propose a new electromagnetism-like mechanism that it includes a new distance measure between solutions and new effective process of attraction and repulsion. Simulation is done on a Solomon data set and its results is compared with other algorithms. It is shown that proposed algorithm has reasonable potential and good performance for solving these kinds of problem.

کلیدواژه ها:

Electromagnetism-like mechanism ، Vehicle routing problem with time windows ، Electromagnetism theory ، Meta-heuristics