Modified honey bees inspired optimization method for transportation problem

Abstract

The Capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is a complex transportation issue that involves designing a set of routes for a group of homogenous vehicles to serve a set of customers at shortest distance travelled. It belongs to the class of NP-hard problems with a high computational complexity, and then it is difficult to solve this problem with traditional optimization methods when the problem size is large. Consequently, in this study, an improved swarm optimization metaheuristic approach has been proposed based on intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees with several specifically designed local search operators and features to solve this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was illustrated on the standard benchmark problems. The results revealed that the proposed approach has fast convergence rate and high computational accuracy. Overall, our experiments show that our approach could be a very efficient approach for solving the CVRP and its experimental results are competitive in terms of the quality of the solutions reported in other well-known methods.