GENETIC ALGORITHMS APPLIED TO THE DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM OF A DAIRY COMPANY: A CASE STUDY

The Vehicle Routing Problem (PRV) aims to determine optimal routes for a fleet from a central depot, minimizing costs and respecting operational constraints. In the particular case of a single vehicle with unlimited capacity, the problem is reduced to the Traveling Salesman Problem (PCV), a classic combinatorial optimization problem classified as NP-hard. This paper addresses a real problem of dairy distribution of a producers' association in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, modeled as a PCV. Three meta-heuristics implemented in Rust are evaluated: Genetic Algorithm, Memetic Algorithm and Computational Transgenetics. The analysis focuses on the quality of the solutions and the stability of the algorithms. A comparative study with methods from the literature is carried out in 12 instances. The results show that the proposed approaches are competitive, reaching new lower limits in some instances.