Solving Vehicle Routing Problems with evolutionary algorithms

One of the most known combinatorial problem is a Travelling Salesman Problem. In this paper a extended version is considered – multisalesman problem, which is known in the literature as a vehicle routing problem. It is very easy to define this NP-hard problem, but to find a optimal solution is very hard. In this work application of evolutionary algorithm is presented. These methods are constructed for optimization problems, but in particular they are very useful for combinatorial problems. In this paper vehicle routing problem is defined and the most known heuristic methods are presented. In the next section, evolutionary program for solving vehicle routing problem is formulated. At the end, the experimental results for some test problems are shown and analyzed.