Case-Oriented Paper
Journal of the Operational Research Society (2009) 60, 934–943. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602633 Published online 18 June 2008
POPMUSIC for a real-world large-scale vehicle routing problem with time windows
A Ostertag1, K F Doerner1, R F Hartl1, E D Taillard2 and P Waelti2
- 1University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
- 2University of Applied Science, Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland
Correspondence: KF Doerner, Department of Business Administration, University of Vienna, Bruenner Strasse 72, 1210 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: karl.doerner@univie.ac.at
Received April 2007; Accepted April 2008; Published online 18 June 2008.
Abstract
This paper presents a heuristic approach based on the POPMUSIC framework for a large-scale Multi Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows derived from real-world data. POPMUSIC is a very powerful tool for tackling large problem instances. A Memetic Algorithm is used as an optimizer in the POPMUSIC framework. It is shown that a population-based search combined with decomposition strategies is a very efficient and flexible tool to tackle real-world problems with regards to solution quality as well as runtime.
Keywords:
vehicle routing, heuristics, problem decomposition
