Vehicle Routing Problem with Weight Coefficients and Stochastic Demands Based on the Cross-Entropy Method

Abstract

The cross-entropy (CE) method is a new generic approach to combinatorial and multi-extremal optimization and rare event simulation. Vehicle Routing Problem has been approved a NP problem and it belongs to classical Combination Optimization hard problem. An effective algorithm based on cross-entropy is designed to solve the model which named Vehicle Routing Problem with Weight Coefficients and Stochastic Demands (WVRPSD) with weight coefficients and stochastic demands. Numerical experiments have been conducted and the results indicate that the method can effectively solve this problem.