A novel membrane-inspired evolutionary algorithm framework for VRPTW

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) has gained much attention recently due to its wide application in operations research and logistics. VRPTW has been proven to be an NP-hard problem whose optimal solution is computationally costly. Scholars have proposed many methods, such as exact algorithms, heuristics, and metaheuristics, to find near-optimal solutions for the VRPTW. Exact algorithms are limited to small-scale problems, while heuristic algorithms and metaheuristics often converge to locally optimal solutions, despite their applicability to larger-scale problems. This paper proposes a novel membrane-inspired evolutionary algorithm framework (MEAF) consisting of isolated evolutionary rules, communication output rules, communication input rules, fusion-exchange information operation, and membrane dissolution rules. By leveraging the advantages of multiple metaheuristics algorithms and avoiding the pitfalls of local optima, MEAF offers a promising solution to address complex problems. The effectiveness of the proposed MEAF is verified by applying three classical metaheuristics, namely Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony System (ACS), and Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO), to solve the VRPTW problem. The experiments are run on 56 instances of Solomon with 100 client benchmarks. The evaluation of the experimental results combined with the mean and standard deviation values show that the algorithm performs better in 54 out of 56 instances, demonstrating the effectiveness and stability of the proposed algorithm.