Metrics for the Evaluation of Optimization Methods in Dynamic Problems: Application to Vehicle Routing Using Ant Systems

Solving dynamic optimization problems is always a challenging task. For this purpose, heuristic and metaheuristic methods are the preferred ones, especially in the context of real-time decision making. In this sense, it is necessary to have evaluation mechanisms for such methods, in order to assist in the selection of one of them to be applied in a particular reality. In this paper we propose metrics for the evaluation of methods that solve real-time dynamic problems that do not require complete knowledge of the search space. These metrics can be used to compare methods quantitatively in various ways. Besides, the application of the proposal on variants of Ant Systems in a classical combinatorial optimization problem such as the Vehicule Routing Problem (VRP) is studied.