Analysis and Synthesis of Vehicle Routing Problems Using Heuristic and Exact Algorithms for Transportation Combinatorial Optimization.

Vehicle routing is a famous discrete optimization problem. It is not guaranteed to obtain optimal solutions across numerous complex cases. Both heuristics and exact algorithms can be used for analysis and synthesis of typical vehicle routing problems. It turns out to be a combinatorial optimization issue in transportation, such as single depot single trip vehicle routing, single depot multiple trip vehicle routing, multiple depot multiple trip vehicle routing. The focus is on performance comparisons of diverse algorithms for these applications, covering exact discrete dynamic programming and heuristic evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, and ant colony optimization). Analysis and synthesis of four schemes will be conducted at diverse scales, so that merits and drawbacks of each approach will be clearly manifested. It provides a feasible way via numerical simulations on how to solve various types of vehicle routing problems most efficiently in a timely fashion.