Application of mixed graph traversal optimization for the vehicle routing problem

The Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is widely discussed in the literature. The goal of the VRP is to provide an optimized traversal of a graph. This paper presents a mixed graph traversal optimization for the VRP. The mixed graph is a graph that contains both directed and undirected edges. The problem to be solved is a parking space search problem in a mixed graph where, from an initial location a vehicle first navigates to a zone, where the selected edges are located, and plans the traversal driving through all selected edges, and returning to the start of the exploration so that the path is repeatable. The paper shows, that the parking space search problem in a mixed graph can be reduced to a travelling salesman problem (TSP), for which an ant colony optimization (ACO) is implemented, to provide a solution, that is minimizing the total cost of the mixed graph traversal.