OVRP-ICA: An imperialist-based optimization algorithm for the open vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) is one of the most important problems in vehicle routing, which has attracted great interest in several recent applications in industries. The purpose in solving the OVRP is to decrease the number of vehicles and to reduce travel distance and time of the vehicles. In this article, a new meta-heuristic algorithm called OVRP-ICA is presented for the above-mentioned problem. This is a kind of combinatorial optimization problem that can use a homogeneous fleet of vehicles that do not necessarily return to the initial depot to solve the problem of offering services to a set of customers exploiting the imperialist competitive algorithm. OVRP-ICA is compared with some well-known state-of-the-art algorithms and the results confirmed that it has high efficiency in solving the above-mentioned problem.