Chemical reaction inspired approach for routing problems with hard time constraints

Abstract

One of the most common issues in logistics and transportation planning is the vehicle routing problem. The objective is to find minimum cost-vehicle routes for serving a set of dispersed customers with deterministic demands while satisfying some constraints. In this paper, we focus on two main constraints, which are vehicle capacity and time windows for customers. We propose to tackle this NP-hard problem with a bio-inspired approach based on a hybridization of Chemical Reaction Optimization and local search method. The solving process of our approach mimics the chemical reactions between molecules to attain their stability with lowest energy. For more diversification of the search space, we involved in the initialization stage a local search method based on greedy adaptive procedure. The performances of our hybrid approach are assessed on the base of various benchmark instances. Simulation results show the good performances and the efficiency of the proposed approach.