Minimizing Energy Consumption and Travel Time in a Vehicle Routing Problem with Time-Dependent Speeds Using an Imperialist Competitive Algorithm

In this paper, a new mathematical model for vehicle routing problem is presented. The objectives are to minimize the energy consumption and the travel times in which speeds varied in different hours of the day. Since the vehicle routing problem belongs to the category of NP-hard problems, to solve the problem, a method based on the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is proposed. Finally, the associated results are compared with the results obtained by particle swarm optimization (PSO) on the well-known benchmark problems.