A Dynamic Logistic Dispatching System With Set-Based Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce, logistics industry becomes a crucial component in the e-commercial ecological chain. Impelled by both economical and environmental benefit, logistics companies demand automated tools more urgently than ever. In this paper, a dynamic logistic dispatching system is proposed. The underlying model of the dispatching system is the dynamic vehicle routing problem which allows new orders being received as the working day progress. With this feature, the system becomes more practical than the systems with traditional static vehicle routing models, but is also more challenging as the vehicles must be scheduled in a dynamic way. The core of the system is a specially designed set-based particle swarm optimization algorithm. According to the characteristic of the problem, a new encoding scheme is defined by set and possibility, and a local refinement method is designed to accelerate the convergence speed of the algorithm. In addition, two more techniques: 1) region partition and 2) archive strategy are incorporated in the dispatching system to reduce the complexity of the problem and to facilitate the optimization process, helping the dispatcher control the vehicles in real time. The proposed system is tested on various benchmarks with different scales. Experimental results show that the proposed dispatching system is effective. © 2013 IEEE.