A hyperheuristic for the dial-a-ride problem with time windows

The dial-a-ride problem with time windows (DARPTW) is a combinatorial optimization problem related to transportation, in which a set of customers must be picked up from an origin location and they have to be delivered to a destination location. A transportation schedule must be constructed for a set of available vehicles, and several constraints have to be considered, particularly time windows, which define an upper and lower time bound for each customer request in which a vehicle must arrive to perform the service. Because of the complexity of DARPTW, a number of algorithms have been proposed for solving the problem, mainly based on metaheuristics such as Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing. In this work, a different approach for solving DARPTW is proposed, designed, and evaluated: hyperheuristics, which are alternative heuristic methods that operate at a higher abstraction level than metaheuristics, because rather than searching in the problem space directly, they search in a space of low-level heuristics to find the best strategy through which good solutions can be found. Although the proposed hyperheuristic uses simple and easy-to-implement operators, the experimental results demonstrate efficient and competitive performance on DARPTW when compared to other metaheuristics from the literature.