Edinburgh Napier University

  Street based routing (SBR) is a real-world inspired routing problem that builds routes within an urban area for mail deliveries. The authors have previously attempted to solve this problem using an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). In this paper the authors examine a heuristic mutation based on concept of building blocks. In this case a building block is defined as a group of genes, which when placed together within a genotype result in a useful feature within the phenotype. After evaluation on three test data sets our experiments conclude that the explicit use of heuristic building blocks makes a significant improvement to the SBR algorithms results.