An artificial bee colony algorithm with local search for vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows

Abstract

This paper presents an artificial bee colony algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows (VRPBTW). This problem is a combination of the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) and the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). In VRPBTW, a homogenous fleet of vehicles are utilized to deliver goods to customers in linehaul set and then to pick up goods from customers in backhaul set. Vehicle capacity, backhaul and time windows are the major constraints for this problem. The objective of VRPBTW is to minimize the sum of route distance that satisfy all constraints. An artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm with local search procedures are proposed to solve the modified Solomon’s VRPTW benchmark problems. The results of computational experiments reveal that the performance of the proposed ABC algorithm is comparable to the other metaheuristics in terms of the quality of solution.