Self-organizing maps in evolutionary approach for the vehicle routing problem with time windows

The article presents the memetic SOM, an evolutionary algorithm embedding self-organizing maps as operators to address the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). We show that it allows to extend the self-organizing map to deal with a version of the vehicle routing problem with time windows where the number of vehicles is an input, and by adding some walking distance from customers to bus stops. Then, we derived solutions for the classical VRPTW with no walking distances. This is illustrated on Solomon’s standard test problems