Improved Genetic Algorithm for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a well-known and complex combinatorial problem, which has received considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose an improved genetic algorithm to solve the VRPTW problem. The proposed approach, called IGA, employs two novel genetic operators. To verify the performance of IGA, we test it on six famous benchmark problems. Simulation results show that IGA outperforms other five compared algorithms on most test instances.