Handicapped Person Transportation: An application of the Grouping Genetic Algorithm

An effective method based on the Genetic Algorithms is proposed to solve the Handicapped Person Transportation problem, which is a real-life application for pickup and delivery problems. In these problems. vehicles have to transport (clients. loads, etc.,) from their locations to different destinations (hospitals, shop centres, etc.). The objective of this paper is to implement Grouping Genetic Algorithm to find optimal (or close to optimal) routes for transporting handicapped people in terms of service quality and number of used vehicles. This algorithm is a stochastic search method based on randomized operators for combining solutions and producing better ones. The proposed algorithm has been applied on the handicapped persons transportation problem in the city of Brussels, Belgium. The obtained results are better than the manually generated solutions in terms of service quality and computational effort. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.