Hybrid Algorithm for Solving the Multi-compartment Vehicle Routing

Problem with Time Windows and Proﬁt

Hadhami Kaabi

and Khaled Jabeur

epartement Informatique, Institut Sup

erieur de Gestion, 41, Avenue de la Libert

e, 2000, Tunis, Tunisia

epartement M

ethodes Quantitatives, Institut Sup

erieur de Commerce et de Comptabilit

Rue Sadok El Jaouani, 7021, Tunis, Tunisia

Keywords:

Multi-compartment, Vehicle Routing, Time Windows, Proﬁt, Genetic Algorithm, Iterated Local Search.

Abstract:

This paper presents a new variant of the well-known vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW).

More precisely, this paper addresses a multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with time windows and

proﬁt (MCVRPTW with proﬁt). The aim of this problem is to serve a set of customers by using a set of

vehicles with multiple compartments, under a minimum traveling cost. The vehicles, starting and ending at

the depot, have a limited capacity and each compartment is dedicated to one product. A customer is served

only within a given time windows and, when it is visited a proﬁt is collected (i.e. a proﬁt not low than a

preset proﬁt bound). To solve this problem, an hybrid approach combining the genetic algorithm (GA) and the

iterated local search (ILS) is used.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the efﬁcient distribution of goods in any

company enhances its competitiveness. To face the

increase in energy costs, an efﬁcient planning of the

delivery paths should be established. This planning

should save resources and money. A well known and

studied problem to deal with this situation is the Vehi-

cle Routing Problem (VRP). The VRP, introduced by

Dantzig and Ramser (1959), is considered as a com-

binatorial optimization problem which is crucial for a

huge area of applications (e.g. logistics, production,

distribution, ect). The VRP is an extension of the clas-

sical Traveling Salesman Problem in which a set of

customers are served with a ﬂeet of vehicles based at

one depot. In any classic VRP, the aim is to ﬁnd a

minimum cost routes such that: (i) each vehicle starts

and ends at the depot, (ii) the total demand on each

route should not exceed the vehicle capacity. Sev-

eral variants of the VRP have appeared and were the

subjects of intense studies such as: VRP with Pickup

and Delivery, Periodic VRP, Capacitated VRP, VRP

with time windows, Stochastic VRP, ect. The multi-

compartment VRP is also a variant of the VRP but it

has not received much attention yet and it is the topic

of our research work.

The multi-compartment VRP (MCVRP) is intro-

duced in 1979 and had practical signiﬁcance (Reed

et al., 2014). The MCVRP consists in transport-

ing different products that should be kept in separate

compartments because of incompatibility constraints.

Each compartment is dedicated to one product. The

demand of each customer for a product is delivered

by one vehicle. However, the entire delivery (e.g. de-

mand) of a customer can be brought by several vehi-

cles (Fallahi et al., 2008). The MCVRP is NP-hard

since it is a particular case of the VRP. Vehicle rout-

ing problems with compartments are well known in

logistics but have little attention in the literature. The

most published papers of the MCVRP concern these

applications:

The distribution of various types of Fuel and oil

((Lahyani et al., 2015), (Relvas et al., 2014), (Cornil-

lier et al., 2012), (Cornillier et al., 2009), (Cornillier et

al., 2008), (Fagerholt et al., 2000)) and some maritime

applications ((Stalhane et al.,2012), (Havattum et al.,

2009)). A second application involves the delivery of

animal foods introduced by Fallahi et al. (2008), and

grocery products requiring different levels of refriger-

ation (e.g. dry, refrigerated and frozen) (Chajakis and

Guignard, 2003). The pickup and delivery of live-

stock is also a known application of the MCVRP as

developed in (Oppen and Lokketangen, 2008). An-

imals should be kept separately to avoid contamina-

tion. Multi-compartment vehicles are also used in

waste collection, where for example the general waste

324

Kaabi H. and Jabeur K..

Hybrid Algorithm for Solving the Multi-compartment Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Proﬁt.

DOI: 10.5220/0005572503240329

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO-2015), pages 324-329

ISBN: 978-989-758-122-9

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

are loaded in a speciﬁed compartment and another

compartment is dedicated to recyclables ((Reed et al.,

2014), (Muyldermans and Pang, 2010)).

The MCVRP with time widows (MCVRPTW)

and proﬁt extends the MCVRP. First, each customer

is served only within a given time windows, which

is a common constraint in various routing problem

(e.g. vehicle routing problem with time windows

(VRPTW)) (Solomon, 1987). Second, the request

of a customer is composed of different products with

which proﬁts are associated . Once a request is satis-

ﬁed , a proﬁt is collected. A customer is visited if and

only if a preset lower bound on the proﬁt is exceeded.

This constraint implies that some customer requests

may not be satisﬁed. This problem is addressed under

different names in the literature. A traveling Salesman

Problems with proﬁts was provided by Feillet et al.

(2011), ((Aras et al., 2011), (Valle et al., 2011)) have

also proposed a selective vehicle routing problem. In

this paper, we propose an hybrid algorithm to solve

the MCVRP with time windows and proﬁt. To the

best of our knowledge, the MCVRP addressed in this

paper is studied for the ﬁrst time. The ﬁrst assump-

tion, is that a ﬂeet of vehicles equipped with multi-

ple compartments, serve customers demands and re-

turn to the depot. Each compartment is dedicated to

one product. Indeed, a product may regroup different

kinds of goods which share the same characteristics.

This case is encountered in the real life application

which consists in the delivery of groceries to conve-

nience stores. The second assumption, is to serve a

customer within a given time windows at minimum

cost and a maximum collected proﬁt. This implies

that the vehicles can not visit all customers.

In this paper, we propose an hybrid approach

based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Iter-

ated Local Search (ILS), to solve the MCVRP with

time windows and proﬁt. This approach exploits the

usefulness of both the GA and ILS.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows. In section 2, the problem formulation is ad-

dressed. In section 3, the hybridization approach

based on the GA and and ILS is presented. In sec-

tion 4, preliminary results are presented. Concluding

remarks and future works are reported in section 5.

2 PROBLEM FORMULATION

The multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with

time windows and proﬁt (MCVRPTW with proﬁt)

proposed can be deﬁned as an undirected complete

graph G(N,E), in which N={0,...,n} represents the set

of nodes and E the set of edges. The depot is repre-

sented by the node 0, and a set of customers is repre-

sented by the set N’. In this deﬁnition, a non negative

routing cost c

i j

and a travel time t

i j

are associated with

each arc (i,j) ∈ E. A ﬂeet V={1,...,v} of identical vehi-

cles with m compartments, deliver a set P={1,...,m} of

m products. Each product p is loaded in compartment

p which has a known capacity Q

. Each customer

i has a known request d

≤ Q

for each product p.

The request of each product to each customer must be

delivered by only one vehicle. However, the different

products required by one customer can be brought by

different vehicles. The customer is served only within

a given time windows [a

] satisfying a

− b

≥ s

where s

denotes the service time. A product is deliv-

ered to a customer if and only if a preset lower bound

on the collected proﬁt is exceeded.

min

∑

i, j

∑

k∈V

i j

i jk

(1)

s.t

∑

i∈N

i jk

≤ 1 j ∈ N

,k ∈ V, (2)

∑

i∈N

i jk

∑

i∈N

jik

j ∈ N

,k ∈ V, (3)

∑

i, j∈S

i jk

≤ |S| − 1 k ∈ V,S ⊆ N

,|S| ≥ 2, (4)

jk p

≤

∑

i∈N

i jk

j ∈ N

,k ∈ V, p ∈ P, (5)

∑

k∈V

jk p

= 1 j ∈ N

, p ∈ P, (6)

∑

j∈N

jk p

≤ Q

k ∈ V, p ∈ P, (7)

i j

− K(1 − x

i jk

) ≤ s

i, j ∈ N

,k ∈ V, (8)

≤ s

≤ b

, i ∈ N,k ∈ V, (9)

∑

k∈V

≥ p

min

j ∈ N

, p ∈ P (10)

i jk

∈

{

0,1

}

i, j ∈ N, i 6= j, k ∈ V, (11)

jk p

∈

{

0,1

}

j ∈ N

,k ∈ V, p ∈ P,d

6= 0. (12)

The objective function (1) minimizes the total

routing cost. Constraints (2) ensure that each cus-

tomer may be visited at most once by each route.

Constraints (3) ensure the continuity of each route: if

a vehicle visits node j it must leave it. Constraints (4)

deﬁne the classical subtour elimination constraints.

Constraints (5) set y

jk p

to zero for each product p if

vehicle k do not serve customer j. Due to constraints

(6), each product required by a customer is brought

by one single vehicle. Constraints (7) ensure the vehi-

cle compartment capacities are respected. Constraints

(8) states that a vehicle k cannot arrive at j before s

+ t

i j

if it is traveling from i to j. Constraints (9) al-

low customer deliveries within a given time windows.

Constraints (10) ensure that a customer is visited if

HybridAlgorithmforSolvingtheMulti-compartmentVehicleRoutingProblemwithTimeWindowsandProfit

325

and only if the collected proﬁt exceed a given proﬁt

lower bound. Constraints (11) set x

i jk

to 1 if and only

if edge (i,j) is traversed by vehicle k. Constraint (12)

set y

jk p

to 1 if and only if customer j receives product

p from vehicle k, 0 otherwise.

3 HYBRID APPROACH

In this section, two meta-heuristics will be combined

(e.g. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Iterated

Local Search (ILS)), to identify a good feasible solu-

tion to our MCVRP with time windows and proﬁt.

3.1 Genetic Algorithm

Genetic Algorithms (GA) are general-purpose search

algorithms that use principles inspired by natural pop-

ulation genetics to evolve solutions to problems (Her-

rera et al., 1998). The GA is used since large number

of studies is adopting the GA in routing problem. The

GA is in fact a population based meta-heuristic. It is

based on the natural mechanism applied to a set of

chromosomes (e.g. candidate solution). Indeed, the

algorithm starts with the generation of the initial pop-

ulation. In each iteration, the chromosomes are evalu-

ated based on a ﬁtness function and then two chromo-

somes are selected by using a selection method. Af-

ter that, the selected chromosomes are altered using

genetic operators. The ﬁrst one is crossover which

combines two parents to create two new offsprings.

The second one is mutation which alters one or more

gene from the offspring to ensure the population di-

versity. At the end, the new offsprings are evaluated

and inserted back in the population. This process is

repeated until a stop condition is met.

3.2 Iterated Local Search

The Iterated Local Search (ILS) approach, intro-

duced by Lourenco et al. in 2003, is used to solve

several combinatorial optimization problems, espe-

cially the routing problems. Compared with other

meta-heuristics such as, Particle Swarm Optimization

(PSO), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic Algo-

rithm (GA), the ILS approach seems to be the most

competitive. The ILS alternates the local search phase

around the incumbent solution and the perturbation

phase, to diversify the search and to escape from local

optima. The algorithm starts its search from an initial

solution S

obtained randomly or returned by a greedy

heuristic. The local search procedure is build to ob-

tain a ﬁrst local optimum. Iteratively, the perturbation

is applied to the current local optimum in order to im-

prove the solution. The algorithm is stopped when a

termination condition is met. The pseudo code of the

ILS approach (Grosso et al., 2009) is depicted in the

following algorithm:

Begin

s0= Generate initial solution;

s*= Local Search (s0);

repeat

s’= Perturbation (s*,history);

s*’= Local Search (s’);

s*= Acceptance criterion (s*,s*’,history);

until termination condition is met;

End.

3.3 Genetic Algorithm with Iterated

Local Search

We propose an hybrid approach combining the GA

and the ILS. Our approach is argued by the fact that

the GA may not converge to a global optimum, in ad-

dition the Local Search procedure may quickly fall in

a local optimum. The main idea behind the hybridiza-

tion is to improve the GA solutions by using an ILS

to intensify the search space. In what follows we will

use the GA to ﬁnd the best solution having the least

traveling cost and which satisfy the temporal and ca-

pacity constraints, whereas the ILS is used to reﬁne

the GA solution and consider the collected proﬁt con-

straint. The pseudo code of the hybrid approach is as

follows:

Begin

Initialize population

Evaluate each candidate;

repeat

Select parents;

Recombine pairs of parents: Crossover;

Mutate the resulting offspring;

Apply ILS to the offspring;

Evaluate new candidates

Replacement candidates for the next generation

until termination condition is met;

End.

3.3.1 Solution Representation

When designing a GA, the representation of each can-

didate (e.g.chromosome) in the population is an ele-

mentary point. In our approach a solution x (i.e. chro-

mosome, candidate) is represented by using a vector

V(x). This vector is a permutation of nodes (cus-

tomers), which tries to insert an order in the current

route, while non violating the temporal and capacity

constraints.

3.3.2 Selection and Crossover

The selection of chromosomes is a crucial step for the

ICINCO2015-12thInternationalConferenceonInformaticsinControl,AutomationandRobotics

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the behaviour of the GA process to generate a

new population. Several selection methods have

been proposed in the literature, for instance the

roulette wheel selection, binary tournament method,

stochastic universal sampling, rank selection and

some others. To randomly select a parent seems

to be a non efﬁcient method. Hence, we use the

same selection method introduced by Reeves in 1995

(Reeves, 1995). In this method, a parent is selected

according to the following probability distribution:

P(S)=

M(M+1)

where S is the S-th chromosome ranked in a descend-

ing order of its objective value (e.g. traveling cost)

and M is the population size. In other words, the chro-

mosome with the best objective value (e.g. the least

cost) has a higher probability to be selected. After

the selection of two parents P1 and P2, the crossover

operation tries to swap parts of two parents in the

population to generate new offsprings (Derbali et al.,

2012). There are many ways to apply the crossover,

and which may affect the performance of the GA. In

our approach , one cutting point i such that 1 ≤ i ≤ ρ

is randomly drawn where ρ is the number of requests.

The subsequence of a chromosome is copied from the

ﬁrst parent till this point, the second parent is than

scanned and the missed customers are added (Derbali

et al., 2012). An example of the crossover operation

with a crossover point cp = 3 is depicted by ﬁgure.1.

Figure 1: Example of crossover operation.

3.3.3 Mutation

This operator is important to escape from local optima

since it contributes to the diversiﬁcation in the popu-

lation . The mutation process consists in removing a

customer at random and then adding a random cus-

tomer at a random position. This may lead to explore

new solutions .

3.3.4 Local Search

The Local search (LS) is the ﬁrst step in an Iterated

Local Search (ILS) approach. The initial solution of

the LS is chosen randomly or by using a metaheuris-

tic. The LS consists in generating a local optimum

solution due to the neighborhood exploration of the

initial solution. The choice of the neighborhood is

one of the important parameter when designing a LS.

The neighborhood can be deﬁned as a modiﬁcation

of the initial solution to reach a new better solution.

The main focus of the LS in our approach is to

ﬁnd a solution with a minimum traveling cost and a

collected proﬁt not low than a preset proﬁt bound. In

other words, we will search for solutions that satisfy

the proﬁt constraint. In our hybrid approach, we use

three neighborhoods including insertion move, swap

move and relocate. The neighborhoods are deﬁned as

follows:

For the neighborhood N1, we insert a request

which is not satisﬁed in the current solution, and

which have a collected proﬁt better than the worst

proﬁt of a given customer in the current solution.

Given a route, the nodes which violate the proﬁt con-

straint are removed and replace by a new sequence of

requests.

Neighborhood N2 applies the 2-opt move, which

consists of replacing two non-adjacent nodes belong-

ing to two different routes, by two non visited nodes.

The temporal, capacity and proﬁt constraints should

be satisﬁed.

Neighborhood N3 address the swap move inside

the same route. More precisely, we consider one

route and swap the position of two nodes belonging

to this route.

After the deﬁnition of the LS neighborhoods, the

LS process is as follows: given an initial solution x

(e.g. provided by the GA), we improve x according

to N1 until we found a solution x1 that can not be

improved. x1 is the generated local optimum which

is considered as the initial solution for the new LS

using N2. We proceed in the same way with N3. This

process is repeated until a local optimum is reached.

3.3.5 Perturbation

The ﬁrst motivation of the ILS algorithm is based

on the perturbation operator which is a large random

move of the current solution. In fact, the process of

the perturbation consists in modifying the current lo-

cal optimum found by the LS, in order to obtain a

new solution. We modify a solution by applying the

swap move. We interchange two random selected cus-

tomers (e.g.nodes) belonging to two different routes.

3.3.6 Evaluation Function

In any GA approach, the chromosomes are compared

HybridAlgorithmforSolvingtheMulti-compartmentVehicleRoutingProblemwithTimeWindowsandProfit

327

thanks to their evaluation functions. In this paper, this

function is the total traveling cost of a vehicle which

leaves the depot, serves customers demands and re-

turn to the depot.

3.3.7 Replacement

The replacement operation consists in keeping the

population size ﬁxed. It is the last operation in the hy-

brid approach. After the creation of the offspring by

using all the previous phases (i.e GA operators and

ILS phases), it is compared with the worst chromo-

some in the population and then the best one is kept.

4 PRELIMINARY RESULTS

The proposed approach will be tested on a set of in-

stances issued from the well known Solomon’s data

set (Solomon, 1987). Since no MCVRP with time

windows instances are available in the literature, a

known instances have been transformed to deal with

our proposed approach. In fact, the data set con-

tains 56 problems divided into 6 instances: C1, R1,

RC1,C2, R2 and RC2. Each instance contains 100

customers and a depot. Each customer i has an as-

sociated demand d

and a time windows [a

]. The

proposed MCVRP with time windows and proﬁt in-

stances are generated as follows. The number of com-

partments m for each vehicle is set to 2. The cus-

tomer request is divided randomly into two parts (El

Fallahi et al., 2008). For each customer i the request

for product 1 is calculated as d

= d

/λ, where λ is a

random integer in [3,5]. The request for product 2 is

calculated as d

= d

− d

. The compartment capac-

ity is computed as Q

= (Q × D

)/(D

+ D

), where

Q is the vehicle capacity in the original VRPTW

(Solomon, 1987) and D

is the average demand for

a product p. The proﬁt π

is set to 1 for each request.

The number of the vehicles is equal to 3.

The proposed approach will be coded in C and will be

tested on an Intel Core I5 with 1.70 GHz. The exper-

iments will be carried out and we will compare our

proposed approach with some results from the litera-

ture, in order to assess the efﬁciency of the proposed

approach.

Table 1 presents the average travel costs results

obtained for each instance and the average CPU time

for all the instances according to the number of ve-

hicles. The ﬁrst column contains the name of the in-

stance and the other columns contain the travel cost

for one, two and three vehicles. The table 1 shows that

the travel cost value increases when the number of ve-

hicles increases and that the problem can be solved

within a reasonable time.

It is difﬁcult to provide a detailed analysis at this mo-

ment since there are no solutions to compare with.

However, in comparison with the solutions found by

Fallahi et al. (2008) (e.g. the average cost is equal

to 998.645 and the average time is equal to 140.28),

our preliminary results are close to the optimal best

known solutions. Further extensive experiments will

be carried out and we will compare our proposed ap-

proach with some results from the literature, in order

to assess the efﬁciency of the proposed approach.

Table 1: Average results of the MCVRP with time windows

and proﬁt.

Instances Cost(m=1) Cost(m=2) Cost(m=3)

C1 42.3 612.2 756

C2 1170.7 1228.4 1331.1

R1 924.2 1055.7 1225.7

R2 559.8 759.2 929.3

RC1 752.3 932.1 796.1

RC2 870.8 998.4 1200.2

Avg cost 803.35 931 1093.73

Avg Time(s) 87.7 145.5 220.8

5 CONCLUSION

This paper introduces a research work dealing with

the MCVRP with time windows and proﬁt as con-

straints. Despite its important practical applications,

this problem is not yet studied in the literature. It

is encountered in a daily distribution of groceries to

convenience stores. The proposed work presents a

ﬁrst study, in terms of problem formulation (i.e. to

consider time windows and collected proﬁt as con-

straints), and in terms of problem resolution. In

fact, an hybrid approach was developed to address

the problem. The mixture exploits the usefulness of

ILS in diversifying the genetic search and improving

the GA population. More precisely, The GA is used

to generate a solution with a minimum total travel-

ing cost, while an ILS is used to optimize the latter

solution, in which the temporal, capacity and proﬁt

constraints are satisﬁed. To asses the efﬁciency, of

our proposed approach, we will compare it to a well-

known benchmarks from the literature. Further re-

search will be focused on more experiments and com-

parison with other solution approaches.

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