Hierarchical Traffic Network for Heuristic Approximation Method of Vehicle Routing Problems

In actual society, accurate delivery planning that can deal with both large scale customers and dynamically fluctuating traffic conditions are expected. Therefore, such delivery planning needs a high performance calculation method for approximate solutions that calculates many approximate solutions to deal with various delivery conditions in a short time. For this reason, we propose an approximate solution calculation method for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) that obtains a better solution in a shorter time. The proposed method generates an approximate solution by using a hierarchical traffic network composed on the basis of a vehicle's behavior, which is the frequency of using roads. We confirmed that the calculation time of the proposed method depends on the constitution rule of the hierarchical network. In this paper, we describe the composition of a hierarchical network that moves closer to the best approximate solution in a short time.