Genetic Algoritm with Elitism for Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is an optimization problem in operational research where customers of known demands are supplied by a central depot. The aim of the problem is to minimize total route cost while satisfying the capacity constraint. Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows is an important variant of VRP. In this every customer should be served within its time windows along with capacity constraint. This is an NP-hard problem, thus many meta heuristic approaches have been proposed to find the optimal solution. In this paper Genetic algorithm (GA) has been used to solve the problem. An attempt has been made to improve already existing GA. The proposed algorithm (EGA) uses new representation scheme and elitism mechanism to solve the problem. The proposed approach is validated on standard Solomon's benchmark problems and computational results shows that the proposed approach is effective and efficient.