An artificial bee colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

• Published in: European journal of operational research 2011-11, Vol.215 (1), p.126-135
• Main Authors: Szeto, W.Y., Wu, Yongzhong, Ho, Sin C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithmics. Computability. Computer arithmetics; Applied sciences; Artificial bee colony; Bees; Comparative analysis; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Flows in networks. Combinatorial problems; Heuristic; Logistics; Metaheuristic; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Route optimization; Routing; Routing Artificial bee colony Metaheuristic; Studies; Theoretical computing
• ISSN: 0377-2217; 1872-6860
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2011.06.006

► We study the capacitated vehicle routing problem. ► We introduce a metaheuristic based on the artificial bee colony framework. ► We also propose an enhancement of the artificial bee colony heuristic. ► Results show that the enhanced heuristic outperforms the original one. This paper introduces an artificial bee colony heuristic for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The artificial bee colony heuristic is a swarm-based heuristic, which mimics the foraging behavior of a honey bee swarm. An enhanced version of the artificial bee colony heuristic is also proposed to improve the solution quality of the original version. The performance of the enhanced heuristic is evaluated on two sets of standard benchmark instances, and compared with the original artificial bee colony heuristic. The computational results show that the enhanced heuristic outperforms the original one, and can produce good solutions when compared with the existing heuristics. These results seem to indicate that the enhanced heuristic is an alternative to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem.