The Bees Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem
This work addresses routing efficiency for logistics and dispatch operations, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing algorithm to a new problem domain.
The authors tackled the Vehicle Routing Problem by developing the Enhanced Bees Algorithm, which achieved competitive results within 0.5% of optimal on benchmarks and produced solutions within 2% of optimal in 60 seconds for real-world dispatch.
In this thesis we present a new algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem called the Enhanced Bees Algorithm. It is adapted from a fairly recent algorithm, the Bees Algorithm, which was developed for continuous optimisation problems. We show that the results obtained by the Enhanced Bees Algorithm are competitive with the best meta-heuristics available for the Vehicle Routing Problem (within 0.5% of the optimal solution for common benchmark problems). We show that the algorithm has good runtime performance, producing results within 2% of the optimal solution within 60 seconds, making it suitable for use within real world dispatch scenarios.