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Generation of VNS Components with Grammatical Evolution for Vehicle Routing

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Book cover Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7831))

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Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a family of problems whereby a fleet of vehicles must service the commodity demands of a set of geographically scattered customers from one or more depots, subject to a number of constraints. Early hyper-heuristic research focussed on selecting and applying a low-level heuristic at a given stage of an optimisation process. Recent trends have led to a number of approaches being developed to automatically generate heuristics for a number of combinatorial optimisation problems. Previous work on the VRP has shown that the application of hyper-heuristic approaches can yield successful results. In this paper we investigate the potential of grammatical evolution as a method to evolve the components of a variable neighbourhood search (VNS) framework. In particular two components are generated; constructive heuristics to create initial solutions and neighbourhood move operators to change the state of a given solution. The proposed method is tested on standard benchmark instances of two common VRP variants.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK

    John H. Drake, Nikolaos Kililis & Ender Özcan

Authors
  1. John H. Drake
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  2. Nikolaos Kililis
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  3. Ender Özcan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Piotowo 2, 60-965, Poznań, Poland

    Krzysztof Krawiec

  2. School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK

    Alberto Moraglio

  3. Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College, 03755, Hanover, NH, USA

    Ting Hu

  4. Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, 34469, Masla, Istanbul, Turkey

    A. Şima Etaner-Uyar

  5. Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna University of Technology, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Bin Hu

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Drake, J.H., Kililis, N., Özcan, E. (2013). Generation of VNS Components with Grammatical Evolution for Vehicle Routing. In: Krawiec, K., Moraglio, A., Hu, T., Etaner-Uyar, A.Ş., Hu, B. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7831. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37207-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37207-0_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37206-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37207-0

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