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Single vehicle pickup and delivery with time windows: made to measure genetic encoding and operators

To the best of our knowledge, only a few researchers have experimented with genetic algorithms (GAs) to tackle the single vehicle pickup and delivery problem with time windows, possibly due to the large number of constraints involved and the difficulty in handling them. In particular, there is the difficulty in designing an appropriate genetic representation and intelligent genetic operators that are able to transfer the ordering characteristic of the parents to the offspring, while preserving the feasibility of the solution. In this research, we will experiment with a genetic encoding and operators specially designed to deal with the problem in hand. We will present a duplicate gene encoding that guarantees the satisfaction of the the precedence constraint, between the pickup and the delivery requests, throughout the search. We aim to show that GAs, if guided by some problem-specific information, will be able to handle this hard problem and possibly other similarly highly constrained problems.