EBBO: an enhanced biogeography-based optimization algorithm for a vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, mixed backhauls, and time windows

This paper presents a new enhanced biogeography-based optimization algorithm (EBBO) for a complex variant of vehicle routing problem (VRP) called HVRPMBTW (vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, mixed backhauls, and time windows). This variant is characterized by a limited number of vehicles with various capacities and costs. The vehicles serves two types of customers: linehaul customers and backhaul customers. Each customer must be visited in a specific interval of time. We propose to improve and to adapt the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) approach to the problem by integrating simulated annealing algorithm to enhance solution quality, at each iteration. This new approach was tested on benchmarks and produces very satisfactory results compared to other approaches, PSO and ACO [1].