A hybrid bat algorithm to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the important problems that has been examined extensively over the past decades. The problem holds a central position within the fields of transportation logistics and supply chain management. Due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, many researchers have developed several heuristics and metaheuristics to solve the problem. This research proposes a hybrid bat algorithm to solve the VRP. The algorithm employs the Bat algorithm hybridized with a modified kmeans algorithm. The proposed solution technique adopts the methodology of cluster first route second to decompose the original VRP into traveling sales man problems (TSPs) with reduced complexity. Benchmark test instances from the literature are used to prove the efficiency of the proposed hybrid algorithm.