Decomposition-Based Multiobjective Evolutionary Optimization With Tabu Search for Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problems

Dynamic pickup and delivery problems (DPDPs) with various constraints, such as docks, time windows, capacity, and last-in-first-out loading, have posed significant challenges for existing vehicle routing algorithms, as most of them only optimize a single weighted objective function, which makes it difficult to maintain the solutions’ diversity and may easily become stuck in local optima. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces a decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with tabu search for solving the above DPDPs. First, our algorithm leverages multiobjectivization and reformulates the DPDP as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP), which is further decomposed into multiple subproblems. Then, these subproblems are approached simultaneously and collaboratively by using a crossover process to enhance the diversity of the solutions, followed by using an efficient tabu search to speed up the convergence. In this way, our algorithm can better balance the trade-off between exploration and exploitation for solving this MOP, and then one promising solution can be selected from the population to complete some pickup and delivery tasks in an interval of the DPDP. Simulation results on 64 test problems from a practical scenario of Huawei demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other competitive algorithms for tackling DPDPs. Additionally, more experiments are conducted on 20 large-scale distribution problems within JD Logistics to validate the generalization capability of our algorithm.