Dr. Eneko Osaba

Transportation is an essential area in the nowadays society, both for business sector and citizenry. There are different kinds of transportation systems, each one with its own characteristics. In the same way, various areas of knowledge can deal efficiently with the transport planning, whether entrepreneurial, or urban. Concretely, this thesis is focused in the area of artificial intelligence and optimization problems.

The majority of the problems related with the transport and logistics have common characteristics. This means that they can be modeled as optimization problems, being able to see them as special cases of other generic problems. These problems fit into the combinatorial optimization field. Much of the problems of this type have an exceptional complexity, requiring the employment of techniques for its treatment. There are different sorts of these methods. Specifically, this work will be focused on meta-heuristics.

A great amount of meta-heuristics can be found the literature, each one with its advantages and disadvantages. Due to the high complexity of combinatorial optimization problems, there is no technique able to solve all these problems optimally. This fact makes the fields of combinatorial optimization and vehicle routing problems be a hot topic of research.

Therefore, this doctoral thesis will focus its efforts on developing a new meta-heuristic to solve different kind of vehicle routing problems. The presented technique offers an added value compared to existing methods, either in relation to the performance, and the contribution of conceptual originality.

With the aim of validating the proposed model, the results obtained by the developed meta-heuristic have been compared with the ones obtained by other four algorithms of similar philosophy. Four well-known routing problems have been used in this experimentation, as well as two classical combinatorial optimization problems. In addition to the comparisons based on parameters such as the mean, or the standard deviation, two different statistical tests have been carried out: the normal z-test, and the Friedman test. Thanks to these tests it can be affirmed that the proposed meta-heuristic is competitive in terms of performance and conceptual originality.