Section SMC Chapter Seminar on Hybrid Memetic Search Approach for Soft-Clustered Vehicle Routing Problem

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North Jersey Section SMC Chapter Seminar on

Hybrid Memetic Search Approach for Soft-Clustered Vehicle Routing Problem

Dr. Yangming Zhou, Assistant Professor

Sino-US Global Logistics Institute

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shanghai, China

Place: https://njit.webex.com/meet/zhou, NJIT, Newark, NJ

Time: 10-11am, Tue., March 22, 2022

Host: MengChu Zhou, Ph.D. & Dist. Professor

Abstract

The soft-clustered vehicle routing problem is a variant of the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem in which customers are grouped into disjoint clusters, and all customers of the same cluster must be served by the same vehicle. Potential applications include parcel delivery in courier companies and freight transportation. Due to its general NP-hard nature and wide applications, it is computationally challenging. In this article, we present an efficient hybrid memetic search method for it. It integrates three distinguishing modules: a group matching-based crossover (to generate promising offspring solutions), a two-level hybrid search to perform local optimization from both cluster-level and customer-level, and a population reconstruction procedure (to escape from deep local optima by bringing new diversity) Extensive experiments on 390 benchmark instances demonstrate that our proposed method achieves highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both solution quality and computation time. In particular, it finds 20 new upper bounds for large-scale instances, and matches 366 best-known upper bounds. Ablation studies are performed to confirm the effectiveness of three key algorithm modules.

Short Bio

Yangming Zhou received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Angers, Angers, France, in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Sino-US Global Logistics Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, and also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Macau Institute of Systems Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China. He has over 20 journal articles, including publications in IEEE TEVC, IEEE TCYB, IEEE TSMC, IEEE TITS, IEEE TCDS, and IEEE TNB. His research interests include evolutionary computation, meta-heuristics, and combinatorial optimization.