earticle

영어

The vehicle routing problem with time window (VRPTW) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem, which is to find the lowest-cost routes from a central depot to a set of geographically scattered points with various demands. This paper deals with a multi-objective variant of the VRPTW that simultaneously minimizes the number of the vehicles and the traveled distance. A metaheuristic based on simulated annealing was proposed, and the concept of archive was introduced, in order to provide a set of tradeoff solutions for the problem. The accuracy of solutions is defined as their proximity to the best known solution of Solomon’s benchmarking tests. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed approach is quite effective, as it provides solutions competitive with the best known in the literature.