Efficient Strategy based on Improved Biogeography-based Algorithm for Inventory Routing problem

Researchers and urban administrators have often considered the routing problem as one of the fundamental phases in developing hazard management systems. In this research, a routing problem is investigated and analyzed by proposing an enhanced metaheuristic algorithm based on biogeography. In this problem, the production planning, inventory management, and distribution planning have been considered, and the purpose is to minimize the total costs of production setup, inventory holding, and distribution of relief products. Then, to avoid the problem of premature convergence to local optima and to improve the efficiency and convergence rate of the algorithm on large-scale and constrained problems, a new optimization algorithm based on biogeography with a new migration operator is proposed. With regard to the instances of routing problems, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to other methods based on the running time, convergence speed, robustness, best and average of the results and statistical superiority. The statistical assessment verifies the efficiency improvements and obtaining better results by the proposed strategy in tackling the temporal relief routing task.