Solving Time Constrained Routing Problems by Exact and Alternative Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, the tendency to minimize the distribution cost is the reason for development and utilization of instruments that take advantage of the optimization. The efficiency may be increased by force of quantitative approaches that are aimed at optimization of physical distribution of the commodities. Related optimization problems are known as routing problems, which are interesting not only for the practical relevance in the fields of transportation, distribution and logistics, but also for theoretical research, because a lot of related problems belong to the NP-hard problems. Generally, those problems could be solved in two ways: by exact methods (branch and bound algorithms, cutting plane method, etc.), that work well for small-size problems, or heuristics (classical heuristics or metaheuristics). The article is aimed to analyse the possibility of solving of routing problems in a classical way (with the help of adequate software) as well as in alternative way (the use of self-organizing migrating algorithm– SOMA that belongs to the group of evolutionary techniques). The efficiency testing includes using free-available instances.