Solve the IRP problem with an improved PSO

Abstract

It is difficult to solve the inventory-routing problem, because it is a NP hard problem. To find the optimal solution with polynomial time is very difficult. Many scholars have studied it for many years to find a good solving method. This paper analyzed the inventory-routing optimization problem. Then considered PSO has a good performance in solving combinatorial optimization problems. The PSO was improved to make it be suitable for solving discrete combination optimization problems. In order to improve the performance of the PSO algorithm to solve the inventory routing problem, this paper put forward dynamic adjustment of inertia weight and accelerator factor of the PSO, and introduced mutation operator in PSO. It is proved by numerical experiments that the proposed algorithm has certain performance advantages, and it also proves that the improved algorithm can improve the performance of the algorithm.