A Membrane-Inspired Algorithm to Solve the Shipping Route Optimization Problem

Shipping route problem is a vital problem for maximizing the profits in sea transportation, which can be essentially regarded as a multi-objective optimization problem. In this work, a model of shipping route optimization problem is established, and then an efficient approach called membrane algorithm is introduced to solve the problem, which is inspired from the behaviors of chemicals communicating among living cells. We test our method on a simulated data experiment. Experimental results show that our method can efficiently find the globally optimal route and performs superior to the genetic algorithm and ant colony algorithm.