SONGKLANAKARIN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Volume 41, No. 01, Month JANUARY, Year 2019, Pages 151 - 158

An artificial bee colony algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows

Tanawat Worawattawechai, Boonyarit Intiyot, Chawalit Jeenanunta

Abstract Download PDF

The vehicle routing problem with backhauls and time windows (VRPBTW) aims to find a feasible vehicle route that minimizes the total traveling distance while imposing capacity, backhaul, and time-window constraints. We present an enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm (EABCA), which is a meta-heuristic, to solve this problem. Three strategies - a forbidden list, the sequential search for onlookers, and the combination of 1-move intra-route exchange and λ-interchange technique - are introduced for EABCA. The proposed method was tested on a set of benchmark instances. The computational results show that the EABCA can produce better solutions than the basic ABCA, and it discovered many new best-known solutions.

Keywords

meta-heuristic, artificial bee colony, backhaul, time window, vehicle routing problems

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