Vehicle routing with fuzzy time windows using a genetic algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents our work-in-progress on the study of a practical variant of the vehicle routing problem in which customers are to be serviced within given service time windows. In comparison with time windows models traditionally studied in the VRP literature in which hard time windows are to be respected when servicing a customer, our problem allows the violation of such time windows by considering fuzzy time windows. A hybrid genetic algorithm with fuzzy membership functions is proposed to solve the multi-objective problem of minimizing total travel distance of vehicles and maximizing customer service level. Preliminary results on a set of experiments carried out using well-known instances from literature are also presented.