An evolutionary approach to time constrained routing problems

Routing problems are an important class of planning problems. Usually there are many different constraints and optimization criteria involved, and it is difficult to find general methods for solving routing problems. We propose an evolutionary solver for such planning problems. An instance of this solver has been tested on a specific routing problem with time constraints. The performance of this evolutionary solver is compared to a biased random solver and a biased hillclimber solver. Results show that the evolutionary solver performs significantly better than the other two solvers.