Hands-On Genetic Algorithms with Python

Solution representation

As usual, the first question we now need to address is how to represent a solution to this problem. A creative way to do so while keeping the similarity to the TSP that we solved before is to represent a solution using a list that contains the numbers from 0 to (n-1) + (m - 1), where n is the number of cities in TSP and m is the number of vehicles. For example, if the number of cities is 10 and the number of vehicles is 3 (n = 10, m = 3), we will have a list containing all the integers from 0 to 11:

(1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 9, 7, 2, 10, 5, 8, 0)

The first n integers, 0 to 9 in our case, still represent the cities, just like before. However, the last (m - 1) integers, 10 and 11 in our case, will be used as delimiters (or separators) ...