SOLVING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM BY A HYBRID IMPROVED PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

The capacity vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is one of the most famous issues in combinatorial optimization that has been considered so far, and has attracted the attention of many scientists and researchers today. Therefore, many exact, heuristic and meta-heuristic methods have been presented in recent decades to solve it. In this paper, due to the weaknesses in the particle swarm optimization (PSO), a hybrid-modified version of this algorithm called PPSO is presented to solve the CVRP problem. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm, 14 standard examples from 50 to 199 customers of the existing literature were considered and the results were compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive with other meta-heuristic algorithms. Besides, this algorithm obtained very close answers to the best known solutions (BKSs) for most of the examples, so that the seven BKSs were produced by PPSO.