An improved artificial bee colony with perturbation operators in scout bees’ phase for solving vehicle routing problem with time windows

An example of a combinatorial problem is the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), which focuses on choosing routes for a limited number of vehicles to serve a group of customers in a restricted period. Meta-heuristics algorithms are successful techniques for VRPTW, and in this study, existing modified artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm is revised to provide an improved solution. One of the drawbacks of the MABC algorithm is its inability to execute wide exploration. A new solution that is produced randomly and being swapped with best solution when the previous solution can no longer be improved is prone to be trapped in local optima. Hence, this study proposes a perturbed MABC known as pertubated (P-MABC) that addresses the problem of local optima. P-MABC deploys five types of perturbation operators where it improvises abandoned solutions by changing customers in the solution. Experimental results show that the proposed P-MABC algorithm requires fewer number of vehicles and least amount of travelled distance compared with MABC. The P-MABC algorithm can be used to improve the search process of other population algorithms and can be applied in solving VRPTW in domain applications such as food distribution.