Heuristics for the Worst Optimal Value of Interval Transportation Problems

TL;DR

This paper develops heuristics, including a memetic algorithm, to efficiently approximate the worst optimal value in interval transportation problems, which are computationally challenging due to NP-hardness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel memetic algorithm combining local search and genetic algorithms for approximating the worst optimal value in interval transportation problems.

Findings

The memetic algorithm outperforms existing methods in numerical experiments.

It finds new best solutions for several benchmark instances.

The approach is computationally efficient for practical problem sizes.

Abstract

An interval transportation problem represents a model for a transportation problem in which the values of supply, demand, and transportation costs are affected by uncertainty and can vary independently within given interval ranges. One of the main tasks of solving interval programming models is computing the best and worst optimal value over all possible choices of the interval data. Although the best optimal value of an interval transportation problem can be computed in polynomial time, computing the worst (finite) optimal value was proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we strengthen a previous result showing a quasi-extreme decomposition for finding the worst optimal value, and building on the result, we design heuristics for efficiently approximating the value. Using a simplified encoding of the scenarios, we first derive a local search method and a genetic algorithm for approximating the worst optimal value. Then, we integrate the two methods into a memetic algorithm, which combines the evolutionary improvement of a genetic algorithm with individual learning implemented via local search. Moreover, we include numerical experiments for a practical comparison of the three different approaches. We also show that the proposed memetic algorithm is competitive with the available state-of-the-art methods for approximating the worst optimal value of interval transportation problems, this is demonstrated by finding the new best solutions for several instances, among others.