Addressing the Vehicle Routing Problem in Large Scale Network via Novel Nature-inspired Algorithm

Nowadays, nature-inspired plays a key role especially in transportation problems and operation management problems. This study presents the application of a novel nature-inspired algorithm to the basic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in the large scale network, in which customers of known demand are supplied from a single depot. Vehicles are subject to a weight limit and, in some cases, to a limit on the distance travelled. Only one vehicle is allowed to supply each customer. Furthermore, to address the proposed problem, RDA inspired by Red Deer’s mating and presented recently as one of novel metaheurisitc methods is introduced. This issue aims to explore the RDA on the proposed VRP for the first time. In addition, computational results are computed for the RDA which is put forward. Further results are given using an imperialist competitive algorithm and genetic algorithm, showing that this approach is competitive with other strong metahuristics in terms of solution time and quality.

Keywords:

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) , Metaheuristics , Red Deer Algorithm (RDA)