Comparison of eight evolutionary crossover operators for the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

This paper deals with evolutionary algorithms for solving the vehicle routing problem. More precisely, the paper is concerned with eight evolutionary crossover operators, which have originally been designed for the traveling salesman problem but can also be used for vehicle routing. The considered crossovers are tested on a set of well known benchmark problem instances.
The obtained experimental results clearly show that the behavior and relative ranking of the operators within the vehicle routing environment is different than within the traveling salesman environment.