Particle Swarm Optimizations for Multi-type Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper presents a variant of vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) named multi-type vehicle routing problem with time windows (MT-VRPTW), which considers both multiple types of the vehicle and the uncertain number of vehicles of various types. As a consequence, the different combinations of multi-type vehicle will lead to diverse results, which should be evaluated by its own fitness function. In order to solve the proposed MT-VRPTW problem, six variants of particle swarm optimization (PSO) are used. The 2N dimensions encoding method is adopted to express the particle (N represents the number of demand point). In the simulation studies, the performances of the six PSO variants are compared and the obtained results are analyzed.