Scheduling and route selection for military land moves using genetic algorithms

We investigate the problem of scheduling the move of a large amount of military equipment from a fort or depot to a port. This problem differs from traditional distribution scheduling problems in a number of ways including: (i) the trucks need to be grouped into convoys, (ii) there is a single source location and a single destination, and (iii) there are potentially so many trucks traveling the same set of roads that the effects on other traffic must be considered. We have divided the problem into two parts: (i) selecting a fixed set of routes and (ii) forming the trucks into convoys and selecting routes and departure times for each convoy. We describe how we have used genetic algorithms to solve each of these problems. We emphasize how the ability to incorporate domain knowledge into the genetic algorithms has allowed us to easily create algorithms well suited to the particular constraints of the problems.