An Enhanced ABC algorithm to Solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

This work proposes an enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). In this work, the fuzzy technique, scatter search method, and SD-based selection method are combined into the artificial bee colony algorithm. Instead of randomly producing the new solution, the scout randomly chooses the replacement solution from the abandoned solutions from the onlooker bee stage. Effective customer location networks are constructed in order to minimize the overall distance. The proposed algorithm is tested on the Solomon benchmark dataset where customers live in different geographical locations. The results from the proposed algorithm are shown in comparison with other algorithms in the literature. The findings from the computational results are very encouraging. Compared to other algorithms, the proposed algorithm produces the best result for all testing problem sets. More significantly, the proposed algorithm obtains better quality than the other algorithms for 39 of the 56 problem instances in terms of vehicle numbers. The proposed algorithm obtains a better number of vehicles and shorter distances than the other algorithm for 20 of the 39 problem instances.