Clustering nodes and discretizing movement to increase the effectiveness of HEFA for a CVRP

Abstract

A Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is an important problem in transportation and industry. It is challenging to be solved using some optimization algorithms. Unfortunately, it is not easy to achieve a global optimum solution. Hence, many researchers use a combination of two or more optimization algorithms, which based on swarm intelligence methods, to overcome the drawbacks of the single algorithm. In this research, a CVRP optimization model, which contains two main processes of clustering and optimization, based on a discrete hybrid evolutionary firefly algorithm (DHEFA), is proposed. Some evaluations on three CVRP cases show that DHEFA produces an averaged effectiveness of 91.74%, which is much more effective than the original FA that gives mean effectiveness of 87.95%. This result shows that clustering nodes into several clusters effectively reduces the problem space, and the DHEFA quickly searches the optimum solution in those partial spaces.