Memetic Algorithm With Extended Neighborhood Search for Capacitated Arc Routing Problems

Abstract

Abstract-The capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) has attracted much attention during the last few years due to its wide applications in real life. Since CARP is NP-hard and exact methods are only applicable to small instances, heuristic and metaheuristic methods are widely adopted when solving CARP. In this paper, we propose a memetic algorithm, namely memetic algorithm with extended neighborhood search (MAENS), for CARP. MAENS is distinct from existing approaches in the utilization of a novel local search operator, namely Merge-Split (MS). The MS operator is capable of searching using large step sizes, and thus has the potential to search the solution space more efficiently and is less likely to be trapped in local optima. Experimental results show that MAENS is superior to a number of state-of-the-art algorithms, and the advanced performance of MAENS is mainly due to the MS operator. The application of the MS operator is not limited to MAENS. It can be easily generalized to other approaches.Index Terms-Capacitated arc routing problem (CARP), evolutionary optimization, local search, memetic algorithm, metaheuristic search.

Dynamic selection of evolutionary operators based on online learning and fitness landscape analysis

“…MAENS*, the case study the for this research, extends the memetic algorithm named MAENS (Tang et al 2009) introduced in 2009. MAENS is a memetic algorithm which makes use of a crossover operator, a local search combining three local move operators and a novel long move operator called MergeSplit, and a ranking selection procedure called stochastic ranking (SR) (Runarsson and Yao 2000).…”

“…The landscape in which MAENS* operates is that of solutions which may potentially violate the capacity constraints of the vehicles. Therefore, we consider the following fitness function, adopted from Tang et al (2009):…”

On investigation of interdependence between sub-problems of the Travelling Thief Problem

“…, m, which has been proved to be NP-hard (Papadimitriou 1977). In this situation, meta-heuristics are good alternatives as it has been demonstrated to be able to obtain competitive solutions within a reasonable computational budget for various NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (Mei et al 2009a(Mei et al , 2011aTang et al 2009;Fuellerer et al 2010;Bolduc et al 2010;De Giovanni and Pezzella 2010;Sbihi 2010). In the following, two metaheuristic approaches are proposed for solving TTP.…”

“…The complete parameter settings of the compared algorithms are given in Table 1. The population size, number of offsprings and probability of local search are set in the standard way that has been verified to be effective on sim- ilar combinatorial optimization problems (Tang et al 2009;Mei et al 2011a). For CC, k = 1 and k = 3 are tested to investigate the effect of k on the performance of CC.…”

“…Although there have been extensive studies for solving various forms of the capacitated arc routing problem depending on different practical scenarios [e.g., the classic model (Mei et al 2009a, b;Tang et al 2009;Fu et al 2010), the multi-objective model (Mei et al 2011a), the stochastic model ), the periodic model (Mei et al 2011b) and the large-scale model (Mei et al 2013(Mei et al , 2014a], two important practical issues have been overlooked so far. One is the service profit, which is the profit that can be gained by serving the customers.…”