Abstract
In this paper, we describe a neural heuristic to find an approximate optimal solution to the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with capacity and time limits constraints. This heuristic is based upon the hierarchical deformable nets (HDN) with stochastic competition introduced by Ghaziri [1991] to solve the VRP with capacity constraints only. For the time limits constraint we have added a constructive procedure to the HDN algorithm. Partial trial solutions are generated one of them is selected using a stochastic competition. In order to improve the results of this approach we have introduced a supervision process to the primary unsupervised algorithm. The performance of this hybrid approach is compared with the unsupervised algorithm and the methods based on other heuristics. We have tested the performance in terms of quality and CPU time consumption. We found that the solutions of the traditional heuristics are still better than the neural heuristics but their CPU time consumption is higher.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chritofides. N., Mingozzi A., and Toth P., (1979) The vehicle routing problem, in Chritofides. N. et al. (eds), Combinatorial Optimization, Wiley, 315–338.
Chritofides. N.and Eilon S. (1969), An Algorithm for Vehicle Dispatching Problem. Opl. Res. Q., vol. 20, pp. 591–601.
Clarke, G. and Wright J.W., (1964), Scheduling of Vehicles from a Central Depot to a Number of Delivery Points, Operations Research vol. 12, pp. 568–581.
Durbin, R. and Willshaw, D. (1987), An analogue approach to the TSP using an elastic net method. Nature 326, 689–691
Fort, J.-C, (1988), Solving a combinatorial problem via self-organizing process: an application of the Kohonen algorithm to the traveling salesman problem, Biol. Cybernetics, vol. 59, pp. 33–40.
Gendreau, M., Hertz A. and Laporte G., (1994), “A Tabu Search Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem”, Management Science 40, 276–1290.
Ghaziri, H. (1991), “Solving routing problems by a self-organizing map”, in Artificial Neural Networks, Vol.1, Kohonen T., et al. (eds), North-Holland,829–834.
Gillett, B. E., and L.R. Miller (1974). A Heuristic Algorithm for the Vehicle Dispatch Problem, Operations Research, vol. 22, 340–347.
Golden, B.L. and Assad A.A., (1988), Vehicle Routing: Methods and Studies, North-Holland, Amsterdam.
Hopfield, J.J., and D.W. Tank (1985), Neural computation of decisions in optimization problems, Biological Cybernetics 52, 141–152.
Kohonen, T. (1982), Self-Organization and Associative Memory, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Mole, R. H. and S. R. Jameson, (1976), A Sequential Route Building Algirithm Employing a Generalised Savings Criterion, Operations Research Quarterly, vol. 27, pp. 503–512.
Osman, I. (1993), “Metastrategy simulated annealing and tabu search algorithms for the vehicle routing problem”, Annals of Operations Research 41, 421–451.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ghaziri, H. (1996). Supervision in the Self-Organizing Feature Map: Application to the Vehicle Routing Problem. In: Osman, I.H., Kelly, J.P. (eds) Meta-Heuristics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1361-8_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1361-8_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-8587-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-1361-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive