Multiobjective Approach to the Vehicle Routing Problem with Demand Responsive Transport

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) has been largely studied over the last years, since problems involving the transport of persons and/or goods have great practical application. This paper addresses the Vehicles Routing Problem with Demand Responsive Transport (VRPDRT), a type of transport which enables customers to be taken to your destination like a taxi or minibus in order to reduce operating costs and to meet customer needs. A multiobjective approach is proposed to VRPDRT in which five different objective functions are used. Using an iterative methodology, known as aggregation tree, the objective functions are used to construct a bi-objective version for the problem. The proposed bi-objective optimization problem is solved via NSGA-II and SPEA2 and the algorithm performances are compared using S-Metric. Through a statistical test, the results shows with 95% of confidence that the NSGA-II presents better convergence when compared with SPEA2.