Combinatorial Bees Algorithm for Vehicle Routing Problem

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that has been studied intensively for years. Although VRP can be solved using an exact method for small instances, a more complex one will be impractical due to the nature of the problem as an NP-hard problem. A metaheuristic is more suitable to solve this kind of problem because the near-optimal solution can be found in a relatively shorter time compared to the exact algorithm. Bees Algorithm (BA) as nature-inspired metaheuristic is used to find a near-optimal solution of VRP-TSPLIB's datasets. This study aims to provide the results of BA on the standard dataset of VRP. The BA has a very good performance, with 3.9% of the average Best-Error and 1.2 million of the average evaluations to reach the solution.