An evolutionary approach to pickup and delivery problem with time windows

Recently, the quality and the diversity of transport services are more and more required. Moreover, in case of a great deal of services and selling goods, a significant part of price is transport cost. Thus, the design of models and applications which make possible efficient transport planning and scheduling becomes important. A great deal of real transport problems may be modelled by using Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW) and capacity constraints, which is based on the realization of a set of transport requests by a fleet of vehicles with given capacities. Each request is described by pickup and delivery locations, time periods when pickup and delivery operations should be performed and needed load. Application of evolutionary approach has brought good results in case of another, simpler transport problem - the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). This paper is aimed at proposing a straightforward extension of VRPTW based heuristics for the PDPTW.