Effect of genetic sectoring on vehicle routing problems with time windows

In vehicle routing problems with time windows (VRPTW), a set of vehicles with limited capacity and travel time, are to routed from a central depot to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands within specified time windows. The VRSPTW is an NP-hard problem. That is, the time taken to solve it optimally increases exponentially with respect to the size of the problem. Genetic sectoring is a partitioning method that uses a genetic algorithm to find feasible solutions for the VRPTW. The genetic sectoring method was tested on a standard set of VRPTW problems. The solutions obtained using genetic sectoring gave better solutions than known conventional methods. The authors carry out a statistical analysis of the solutions obtained using genetic sectoring, to ascertain the kind of problems in which it would be advantageous to use the genetic sectoring method.<>