Clarke and wright heuristic; Combinatorics; Genetic algorithm; Sweep algorithm; Taillard's algorithm; VRP - Vehicle Routing Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most challenging combinatorial optimization tasks. This problem consists in designing an optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles in order to serve a given set of customers. Vehicle routing problem forms an integral part of the supply chain management, which plays a significant role in productivity improvement in organizations through an efficient and effective delivery of goods/services to customers. This problem is known to be NP-hard; hence many heuristic procedures for its solution have been suggested. For such problems, it is often desirable to obtain approximate solutions, so they can be found fast enough and are sufficiently accurate for the purpose. In this paper, we have performed an experimental study that indicates a suitable use of genetic algorithms for the vehicle routing problem. We tested instances from Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem Library (CVRPLIB) series A, B, E, M and X. The obtained experimental outputs were compared with the following heuristics: the Clarke and Wright heuristic, sweep algorithm, and Taillard?s algorithm. © European Society of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering.