A New Solution Representation to Improve the Performance of Meta-Heuristics for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the basic problems in supply chain management, material handling process and some other real world applications. The problem is still being approached by many researchers due its practical applicability and the fact that no proposal can yet achieve the optimal solutions for all the different problems. Among the recent developments, swarm optimization techniques get popularized to solve many optimization problems including VRP and its different variations. Especially, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has drawn a considerable attraction of the researchers to handle the VRPs in recent years. However, an efficient representation of the different candidate solutions as particles and a competent method of applying PSO operations on them are yet to be designed. In this paper, we propose a swap sequence based particle swarm optimization (SSPSO) approach, which is much simpler as compared to the other available tactics, for a capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). Experimental results show that the proposed SSPSO outperforms the other approaches to solve CVRP.