A hybrid evolution strategy for the open vehicle routing problem

This paper presents a hybrid evolution strategy (ES) for solving the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP), which is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that addresses the service of a set of customers using a homogeneous fleet of non-depot returning capacitated vehicles. The objective is to minimize the fleet size and the distance traveled. The proposed solution method manipulates a population of @m individuals using a (@m+@l)-ES; at each generation, a new intermediate population of @l offspring is produced via mutation, using arcs extracted from parent individuals. The selection and combination of arcs is dictated by a vector of strategy parameters. A multi-parent recombination …