ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4(4), 2019-2044; doi:10.3390/ijgi4042019
A Novel Spatial-Temporal Voronoi Diagram-Based Heuristic Approach for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Optimization with Time Constraints
1
College of Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
2
Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Spatial Information Smart Sensing and Services, College of Civil Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
3
Key Laboratory for Geo-Environmental Monitoring of Coastal Zone of the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and GeoInformation, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
4
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Wolfgang Kainz
Received: 28 July 2015 / Revised: 2 September 2015 / Accepted: 8 October 2015 / Published: 12 October 2015
Abstract
Vehicle routing optimization (VRO) designs the best routes to reduce travel cost, energy consumption, and carbon emission. Due to non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) complexity, many VROs involved in real-world applications require too much computing effort. Shortening computing time for VRO is a great challenge for state-of-the-art spatial optimization algorithms. From a spatial-temporal perspective, this paper presents a spatial-temporal Voronoi diagram-based heuristic approach for large-scale vehicle routing problems with time windows (VRPTW). Considering time constraints, a spatial-temporal Voronoi distance is derived from the spatial-temporal Voronoi diagram to find near neighbors in the space-time searching context. A Voronoi distance decay strategy that integrates a time warp operation is proposed to accelerate local search procedures. A spatial-temporal feature-guided search is developed to improve unpromising micro route structures. Experiments on VRPTW benchmarks and real-world instances are conducted to verify performance. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is competitive with state-of-the-art heuristics and achieves high-quality solutions for large-scale instances of VRPTWs in a short time. This novel approach will contribute to spatial decision support community by developing an effective vehicle routing optimization method for large transportation applications in both public and private sectors. View Full-TextKeywords:
spatial decision support system; vehicle routing problem; Voronoi diagram; heuristics; local search; distance decay
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
Scifeed alert for new publications
Never miss any articles matching your research from any publisher- Get alerts for new papers matching your research
- Find out the new papers from selected authors
- Updated daily for 49'000+ journals and 6000+ publishers
- Define your Scifeed now
Share & Cite This Article
MDPI and ACS Style
Tu, W.; Li, Q.; Fang, Z.; Zhou, B. A Novel Spatial-Temporal Voronoi Diagram-Based Heuristic Approach for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Optimization with Time Constraints. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4, 2019-2044.
Related Articles
Article Metrics
Comments
[Return to top]
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.
EISSN 2220-9964
Published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland
RSS
E-Mail Table of Contents Alert