A distributed evolutionary algorithm with a superlinear speedup for solving the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

In this paper we present a distributed evolutionary algorithm for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Our algorithm consists of autonomous processes that create heterogeneous evolutionary environments, perform evolution on separate populations of chromosomes, and communicate asynchronously through occasional migrations of chromosomes. The paper also presents experiments where the algorithm has been tested on some benchmark problem instances. By measuring the effects of distribution on solution quality and on computing time, the experiments confirm that the algorithm achieves a superlinear speedup.