A Novel Permutation Based Solution Representation Technique for Vehicle Routing Problems on GPUs

Abstract

In this study, the vehicle routing problem (VRP) which is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem is handled on graphic processing units (GPUs). Solving any kind of VRP is extremely hard when the instance size is large. For this reason, researchers tend to solve the VRP with meta-heuristics. Although, many well-designed meta-heuristics produce near-optimal solutions in reasonable time, still a challenge to solve large scale instances. To accomplish this issue, researchers need novel, fast and wisely designed parallel operators for the proposed algorithms. Furthermore, the success of these operators directly depends on the way the solution is represented. This paper offers a new permutation based solution representation technique (?+) for vehicle routing problems on GPUs. Results show that proposed technique can be used in many algorithms to accelerate computations.