A new Electromagnetism-Like Mechanism for solving the vehicle routing problem with time window constraint

Vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that is crucial for transportation and logistics systems. The objective of the VRPTW is serve a number of customers within predefined time windows at minimum cost, without violating the capacity constraint for each vehicle. This problems are best solved by heuristics. EM is a new metaheuristic method and inspired by the attraction and repulsion mechanism of the electromagnetism theory. we propose a new electromagnetism-like mechanism that it includes a new distance measure between solutions and new effective process of attraction and repulsion. Simulation is done on a Solomon data set and its results is compared with other algorithms. It is shown that proposed algorithm has reasonable potential and good performance for solving these kinds of problem.

Keywords:

Electromagnetism-like mechanism , Vehicle routing problem with time windows , Electromagnetism theory , Meta-heuristics