A Hybrid Algorithm Based on ACO and PSO for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems

The vehicle routing problem VRP is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. It has been studied for several decades because finding effective vehicle routes is an important issue of logistic management. This paper proposes a new hybrid algorithm based on two main swarm intelligence SI approaches, ant colony optimization ACO and particle swarm optimization PSO , for solving capacitated vehicle routing problems CVRPs . In the proposed algorithm, each artificial ant, like a particle in PSO, is allowed to memorize the best solution ever found. After solution construction, only elite ants can update pheromone according to their own best-so-far solutions. Moreover, a pheromone disturbance method is embedded into the ACO framework to overcome the problem of pheromone stagnation. Two sets of benchmark problems were selected to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in comparison with existing swarm intelligence approaches.