Improved Nature Inspired Intelligence Techniques for Shortest Path Routing in Network Problems

Abstract

One of the central problems of supply chain management is the coordination of product and material flows between locations. A typical problem involves bringing products located at a central facility to geographically dispersed facilities at minimum cost. One basic and well-known problem in transportation is the vehicle scheduling and routing. A vehicle scheduling system should output a set of instructions telling drivers what to deliver, when and where. An “efficient” solution is one that enables goods to be delivered when and where required at least cost, subject to legal and political constraints. The legal constraints relate to hours of work, speed limits, vehicle construction and use regulations, and restrictions for unloading, and so on. With the growing of sales by Internet, this problem is gaining enormous importance, since the delivery times are usually very short, the customers can be dispersed in a region, every day there is a different set of customers and also with very short time-windows to deliver the product. This proposed work presents a decision support system based on Artificial Intelligence Heuristics for a single- mode Routing problem.