Solving the CVRP problem using a hybrid PSO approach

Abstract

The goal of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is to minimize the total distance of vehicle routes under the constraints of vehicles' capacity. CVRP is classified as NP-hard problems and a number of metaheuristic approaches have been proposed to solve the problem. This paper aims to develop a hybrid algorithm combining a discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with Simulated Annealing (SA) to solve CVRPs. The two-stage approach of CVRP (cluster first and route second) has been adopted in the algorithm. To save computation time, a short solution representation has been adopted. The computational results demonstrate that our hybrid algorithm can effectively solve CVRPs within reasonable time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.