A hybrid genetic algorithm proposal for an open vehicle routing problem which considers real life costs

Open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is regarded as minimizing the total distance travelled by vehicles which are not returning to the depot, under some constraints. Actually, most of the logistic firms do not do the costing according to the total distance travelled. Mostly, there are preferred standardized courses for certain nodes. The costs arising from following these standard courses are the standard costs of the related nodes. In a route which has a node creating a standart cost, stop-by costs and standard route deviation costs should be added in order to reach the total cost of the route. In this study, OVRP is modeled with these real life costs which are named as standart routing costs, stop-by costs and route deviation costs. The problem is an NP-Hard problem and softwares giving exact solutions are inadequate in solving these problems. Since metaheuristic approach is a good way of having good solutions within a reasonable period of time, the problem is solved via a hybrid genetic algorithm.