Evolutionary computation for dynamic capacitated arc routing problem

In this chapter, a new dynamic capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) is defined and investigated. Compared with the static CARP and other dynamic CARP investigated by the existing researches, the new dynamic CARP is more general and closer to reality, and thus is more worthwhile to be solved. Due to the stochastic factors included in the dynamic CARP, the objective is not to obtain the optimal solution in a specific environment, but to find a robust solution that shows good performance in all the possible environments. For the dynamic CARP, a robustness measure based on repair operator is defined. The corresponding repair operator is designed according to the real-world considerations. Then, the benchmark instances of the dynamic CARP are generated by extending from the static counterparts to facilitate evaluating potential approaches. After that, the preliminary analysis for the fitness landscape of the dynamic CARP is conducted by experimental studies. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.