Agents towards vehicle routing problems

A multi-agent VRP solver is presented in this paper. It utilizes the contract-net protocol based allocation and several improvement strategies. It provides the solution with the quality of 81% compared to the optimal solution on 115 benchmark instances in polynomial time. The self-organizing capability of the system successfully minimizes the number of vehicles used. The presented solver architecture supports great runtime parallelization with incremental increase of solution quality. The presented solver demonstrates applicability to the VRP problem and easy adaptation to problem variants. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence--Intelligent agents, Multiagent systems General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Performance, Experimentation Keywords Vehicle routing problem, heuristic, multi-agent solver, benchmarks

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Jirí Vokrínek, Antonín Komenda, Michal Pechoucek
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Intelligent Agents, Multi-agent Vrp Solver, Presented Solver, Presented Solver Architecture