An improved evolutionary approach to the Extended Capacitated Arc Routing Problem

The Extended Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (ECARP) is a challenging vehicle routing problem with numerous real-world applications. We propose an improved evolutionary approach to cope with the ECARP in this research. The exploitation of heuristic information characterizes our approach. Two kinds of heuristic information, Arc Assignment Priority Information and Performance Information of Operators, are learned from the obtained near-optimal ECARP solutions. The Arc Assignment Priority Information is employed to decide one suitable broken position for the crossover and mutation operation, while the Performance Information of Operators is used to select an appropriate operator for the operations of selection, crossover and mutation. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by 20 instances with up to 100 nodes and 360 arcs. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.