Simulation-based approach to Vehicle Routing Problem with Traffic Jams

Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a well-known NP-hard optimization problem. In this paper, we transform it into a non-deterministic dynamic version by introducing traffic jams (TJ). The paper is the first attempt of applying the Upper Confidence Bounds applied to Trees (UCT) algorithm in the domain of dynamic transportation problems. In short, UCT is an extension to the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method, however, unlike MCTS which makes use of uniformly distributed simulations, the UCT algorithm aims at maintaining an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation. The MCTS/UCT algorithm is enhanced by the usage of knowledge-based actions, which shares common traits with the human way of solving this task. Our solution is compared with an Ant Colony Optimization method showing its upper-hand and raising hope for a crossdomain applicability of the proposed approach.