A Hybrid Bat Algorithm with Path Relinking for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an NP-hard problem with both engineering and theoretical interests. In this paper, a hybrid bat algorithm with path relinking (HBA-PR) is proposed to solve CVRP. The HBA-PR is constructed based on the framework of the continuous bat algorithm, the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and path relinking are effectively integrated into the bat algorithm. Moreover, in order to further improve the performance, the random subsequences and single-point local search are operated with certain loudness (a probability). In order to verify the effectiveness of our approach and its efficiency and compare with other existing methodologies, several classical CVRP instances from three classes of CVRP benchmarks are selected to test. Experimental results and comparisons show the HBA-PR is effective for solving CVRPs.