Abstract:

An artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed to solve the vehicle routing problem. The algorithm gives a natural number coding method for the food source and adopts neighborhood inversion to produce a candidate food source. It is applied to solve multiple instances of the vehicle routing problem. It is compared with other heuristic algorithms on a set of benchmark instances, and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed artificial bee colony algorithm, which presents a new vision for other combination optimization problems.

Key words: vehicle routing problem;combination optimization;artificial bee colony algorithm;neighborhood inversion