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Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in the Memetic Algorithm via a Switching Mechanism for the Large-Scale VRPTW

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Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12112))

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Abstract

This paper presents an effective memetic algorithm for the large-scale vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Memetic algorithms consist of an evolutionary algorithm for the global exploration and a local search algorithm for the exploitation. In this paper, a switching mechanism is introduced to balance quantitatively between exploration and exploitation, to improve the convergent performance. Specifically, a similarity measure and a sigmoid function is defined to guide the crossover. Experimental results on Gehring and Homberger’s benchmark show that this algorithm outperforms previous approaches and improves 34 best-known solutions out of 180 large-scale instances. Although this paper focuses on the VRPTW, the proposed switching mechanism can be applied to accelerate more general genetic algorithms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sintef website: https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/top/vrptw/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhejiang Cainiao Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, China

    Ying Zhang, Dandan Zhang, Longfei Wang, Zhu He & Haoyuan Hu

Authors
  1. Ying Zhang
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  2. Dandan Zhang
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  3. Longfei Wang
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  4. Zhu He
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  5. Haoyuan Hu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ying Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dankook University, Yongin, Korea (Republic of)

    Yunmook Nah

  2. Peking University, Haidian, China

    Bin Cui

  3. Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea (Republic of)

    Sang-Won Lee

  4. Department of System Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Jeffrey Xu Yu

  5. Kangwon National University, Chunchon, Korea (Republic of)

    Yang-Sae Moon

  6. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea (Republic of)

    Steven Euijong Whang

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Zhang, Y., Zhang, D., Wang, L., He, Z., Hu, H. (2020). Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in the Memetic Algorithm via a Switching Mechanism for the Large-Scale VRPTW. In: Nah, Y., Cui, B., Lee, SW., Yu, J.X., Moon, YS., Whang, S.E. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12112. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59410-7_23

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