A Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Order Release Time Based on a Hybrid Harmony Search

Abstract

With the popularity of Internet technology, e-commerce enterprises have rapidly developed. Orders need to be collected before delivery, and vehicles are waiting in the warehouse for most enterprises. This paper considers a capacitated vehicle routing problem with order release time, with the aim of minimizing the maximum order delivery time. A mathematical model is first built, and then, a hybrid harmony search algorithm is proposed to address the nearest optimal solutions, with three methods to generate initial harmony memory, an optimization algorithm to evaluate each harmony and a tabu search to improve initial solutions and neighbourhood solutions. The linear programming software CPLEX is applied to verify the rationality of the mathematical model. Computational results indicate that the average solution quality of all generated instances obtained by the hybrid harmony search is better than the current operational strategy of the enterprise, a tabu search algorithm and a genetic algorithm in the related articles.