Metaheuristic Algorithms Based on Compromise Programming for the Multi-Objective Urban Shipment Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and its variants are found in many fields, especially logistics. In this study, we introduced an adaptive method to a complex VRP. It combines multi-objective optimization and several forms of VRPs with practical requirements for an urban shipment system. The optimizer needs to consider terrain and traffic conditions. The proposed model also considers customers’ expectations and shipper considerations as goals, and a common goal such as transportation cost. We offered compromise programming to approach the multi-objective problem by decomposing the original multi-objective problem into a minimized distance-based problem. We designed a hybrid version of the genetic algorithm with the local search algorithm to solve the proposed problem. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with the Tabu Search algorithm and the original genetic algorithm on the tested dataset. The results show that our method is an effective decision-making tool for the multi-objective VRP and an effective solver for the new variation of VRP.