Modern Smart Cities are highly dependent on an efficient energy service since electricity is used in an increasing number of urban activities. In this regard, Time-of-Use prices for electricity is a widely implemented policy that has been successful to balance electricity consumption along the day and, thus, diminish the stress and risk of shortcuts of electric grids in peak hours. Indeed, residential customers may now schedule the use of deferrable electrical appliances in their smart homes in off-peak hours to reduce the electricity bill. In this context, this work aims to develop an automatic planning tool that accounts for minimizing the electricity costs and enhancing user satisfaction, allowing them to make more efficient usage of the energy consumed. The household energy consumption planning problem is addressed with a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm, for which problem-specific operators are devised, and a set of state-of-the-art greedy algorithms aim to optimize different criteria. The proposed resolution algorithms are tested over a set of realistic instances built using real-world energy consumption data, Time-of-Use prices from an electricity company, and user preferences estimated from historical information and sensor data. The results show that the evolutionary algorithm is able to improve upon the greedy algorithms both in terms of the electricity costs and user satisfaction and largely outperforms to a large extent the current strategy without planning implemented by users.

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) have usually been studied with a single objective function defined by the distances associated with the routing of vehicles. The central problem is to design a set of routes to meet the demands of customers at minimum cost. However, in real life, it is necessary to take into account other objective functions, such as social functions, which consider, for example, the drivers' workload balance. This has led to growth in both the formulation of multiobjective models and exact and approximate solution techniques. In this article, to verify the quality of the results, first, a mathematical model is proposed that takes into account both economic and work balance objectives simultaneously and is solved using an exact method based on the decomposition approach. This method is used to compare the accuracy of the proposed approximate method in test cases of medium mathematical complexity. Second, an approximate method based on the Iterated Local Search (ILS) metaheuristic and Decomposition (ILS/D) is proposed to solve the biobjective Capacitated VRP (bi-CVRP) using test cases of medium and high mathematical complexity. Finally, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) approximate method is implemented to compare both medium- and high-complexity test cases with a benchmark. The obtained results show that ILS/D is a promising technique for solving VRPs with a multiobjective approach.

This paper is interested in pharmaceuticals distribution which is one of the most important activities and ensures the availability of drug products to a set of customers (pharmacies). The study introduces the Disrupted Vehicle Routing problem with Soft Time Windows since pharmaceutical distributors should respond to increased demands for products to ensure timely and efficient delivery to dynamic demands. We also propose an improved multiobjective local search (IMOLS), which uses methods of neighborhood search such as large neighborhood search (LNS) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) based on a hybrid approach in the optimization of vehicle routes. The algorithm is expected to achieve competitive results compared with previously published studies.

This paper offers a novel multiobjective approach – Multiobjective Ions Motion Optimization (MOIMO) algorithm stimulated by the movements of ions in nature. The main inspiration behind this approach is the force of attraction and repulsion between anions and cations. A storage and leader selection strategy is combined with the single objective Ions Motion Optimization (IMO) approach to estimate the Pareto optimum front for multiobjective optimization. The proposed method is applied to 18 different benchmark test functions to confirm its efficiency in finding optimal solutions. The outcomes are compared with three novel and well-accepted techniques in the literature using five performance parameters quantitatively and obtained Pareto fronts qualitatively. The comparison proves that MOIMO can approximate Pareto optimal solutions with good convergence and coverage with minimum computational time.

This paper presents a multiobjective ant colony algorithm for the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (MDVRPB) where three objectives of traveled distance, traveling times and total consumption of energy are minimized. An ant colony algorithm is proposed to solve the MDVRPB. The solution scheme allows one to find a set of ordered solutions in Pareto fronts by considering the concept of dominance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is examined by considering a set of instances adapted from the literature. The computational results show high quality results within short computing times.