Artificial bee colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Abstract

This paper presents an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm adjusted for the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The vehicle routing problem is an NP-hard problem and capacitated vehicle routing problem variant (CVRP) is considered here. The artificial bee metaheuristic was successfully used mostly on continuous unconstrained and constrained problems. Here this algorithm has been implemented for rather different type of problems and tested on twelve benchmark instances of small scale problems. Our results were compared to the best known results. The computational study showed that the proposed algorithm is a good and promising approach for capacitated vehicle routing problem.