1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a generic name given to a

set of problems in which set of routes for a fleet of vehicles based at one or
several depots are to be formed for servicing the customers dispersed
geographically. The objective of the VRP is to form a route with lowest cost
to serve all customers. More than 50 years have elapsed since Dantzig and
Ramser introduced the VRP in 1959 (Dantzig and Ramser 1959). They
proposed the first mathematical programming formulation and algorithmic
approach. They also described VRP with a real-world application concerning
the delivery of gasoline to service stations. Clarke and Wright (1964)
proposed an effective greedy heuristic that improved on the Dantzig-Ramser
approach. After these two papers, many models and algorithms are proposed
for the optimal and approximate solution of the different versions of the VRP
(Toth and Vigo 2002).
1.1

VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM

Generally, distribution or collection of goods from customers to

depot is called as VRP or Vehicle Scheduling Problem. The distribution of

goods concerns the service, in a given time period, to a set of customers by a
fleet of vehicles, which are located in one or more depots. These vehicles are
operated by a set of crews (drivers), and perform their movements by using an
appropriate network. In particular, the solution of a VRP calls for the
determination of a set of routes, each performed by a single vehicle that starts

2
and ends at its own depot, such that all the requirements of the customers are
fulfilled, with some operational constraints and the global transportation cost
is minimized. The operational constraints can be a vehicle capacity, route
length, time window, precedence relation between customers, etc. Figure 1.1
illustrates a VRP with 3 vehicles serving 10 customers forming 3 routes.

Figure 1.1 Vehicle Routing Problem

A single universally accepted definition of the VRP does not exist
because of the diversity of constraints encountered in practice. VRP is a well
known integer programming problem which falls into the category of NP-hard
problems, meaning that the computational effort required in solving this
problem increases exponentially with the problem size. 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. The Vehicle Routing
Problem (VRP) can be seen as a merge of two well-known problems:
Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) and Bin Packing Problem (BPP). TSP
as a special case when the number of vehicle is one and its capacity is infinity.
VRP is considerably more difficult to solve than a TSP of the same customer
size (Laporte 2007). VRP is one of the most important, and most studied
Combinatorial Optimization Problem (COP).

3
1.2

VARIANTS OF VRP
Usually, in real world VRPs, many side constraints will appear.

Some of the most important types of VRPs are (Hrvoje Markovi et al 2004)
shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Basic Variants of VRP

Capacitated VRP (CVRP) - CVRP is a Vehicle Routing
Problem (VRP) in which a fixed fleet of delivery vehicles of
uniform capacity must provide service to known customer
demands for a single commodity from a common depot at
minimum transit cost. That is, CVRP is like VRP with the
additional constraint that every vehicle must have uniform
capacity of a single commodity (Ralphs, 1991).
VRP with Time Windows (VRPTW) - The VRPTW is the
VRP with the additional restriction that is, a time window is
associated with each customer, defining an interval [e0, l0]
wherein the customer has to be supplied where e0 and l0
represents the early and late time. The interval [e0, l0] at the
depot is called the scheduling horizon (Solomon, 1995).
VRP with Backhauls (VRPB) - The VRPB is the extension of
the VRP in which the customer set is partitioned into two

4
subsets. One contains customers that require a given quantity
of product to be delivered and the second contains customers
where a given quantity of inbound products must be picked up
(Goetschalckx 1993).
Distance-Constrained VRP (DCVRP) In DCVRP, each route
has a maximum length (or time) constraint instead of capacity
constraint.
Multi-Depot VRP (MDVRP) - A company may have several
depots from which it can serve its customers. If the customers
are clustered around depots, then the distribution problem
should be modeled as a set of independent VRPs. However, if
the customers and the depots are intermingled, then a MDVRP
should be solved. A MDVRP requires the assignment of
customers to depots. A fleet of vehicles is based at each depot.
Each vehicle originates from one depot, provide service to the
customers assigned to that depot, and return to the same depot.
The objective of the problem is to service all customers while
minimizing the number of vehicles and travel distance
(Hjorring, 1995). Giosa et al (2002) compared assigning of
customers to depot using six heuristic for multi-depot
VRPTW.
VRP with Pick-Up and Delivering (VRPPD) - The Vehicle
Routing Problem with Pick-up and Delivering (VRPPD) is a
VRP in which the possibility that customers return some
commodities is contemplated (Righini, 2000). So in VRPPD,
it should be taken into account that the goods returned by
customers to the delivery vehicle must fit into it. These
restrictions make the planning problem more difficult and can
lead to bad utilization of the vehicles capacities, increased

5
travel distances or a need for more vehicles. Hence, it is usual
to consider restricted situations where all delivery demands
start from the depot and all pick-up demands shall be brought
back to the depot, so there are no interchanges of goods
between the customers. Another alternative is relaxing the
restriction that all customers have to be visited exactly once.
Another usual simplification is to consider that every vehicle
must deliver all the commodities before picking up any goods
(Savelsbergh 1995).
Split Delivery VRP (SDVRP) - SDVRP is a relaxation of the
VRP wherein it is allowed that the same customer can be
served by different vehicles if it reduces overall costs. This
relaxation is very important if the sizes of the customer orders
are as big as the capacity of a vehicle (Dror and Trudeau
1990; Archetti et al 2006)
Stochastic VRP (SVRP) - Some values (like number of
customers, their demands, serve time or travel time) are
random. Stochastic VRP (SVRP) is a VRP where one or
several components of the problem are random (Laporte,
1998). Three different kinds of SVRP are:
o

Stochastic customers: Each customer vi is present with

probability pi and absent with probability 1-pi.

Stochastic demands: The demand di of each customer is a

random variable.

Stochastic times: Service times and travel times tij are

random variables.

6
In SVRP, two stages are made for getting a solution. A first
solution is determined before knowing the realizations of the random
variables. In the second stage, a recourse or corrective action can be taken
when the values of the random variables are known (Steward and Golden
1980; Jaillet 1987).
Periodic VRP (PVRP) - In classical VRPs, typically the
planning period is a single day. In the case of the Period
Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP), the classical VRP is
generalized by extending the planning period to a specified
number of days (Angelelli and Speranza 2002).
1.3

APPLICATIONS OF VRP
There are several important problems that must be solved in real-

time. The main applications that motivate the research in the field of the realtime VRPs are listed below (Ghiani et al 2003).
i.

Dynamic fleet management: Several large scale trucking

operations require real-time dispatching of vehicles for the
purpose of collecting or delivering shipments. Important
savings can be achieved by optimizing these operations.

ii.

Vendor-managed distribution systems: In vendor-managed

distribution

systems,

distribution

companies

estimate

customer inventory level in such a way to replenish them

before they run out of stock. Hence, demands are known
beforehand in principle and all customers are static. However,
because demand is uncertain at some time, some customers
(usually a small percentage) may run out of stock and have to
be serviced urgently.

7
iii.

Couriers: Long-distance courier need to collect locally

outbound parcels before sending them to a remote terminal to
consolidate loads. Also, loads coming from remote terminals
have to be distributed locally. Most pick-up requests are
dynamic and have to be serviced the same day if possible.

iv.

Rescue and repair service companies: There are several

companies providing rescue or repair services (broken car
rescue, appliance repair, etc.).

v.

Dial-a-ride

systems:

Dial-a-ride

systems

provide

transportation services to people between given origin

destination pairs. Customers can book a trip one day in
advance (static customers) or make a request at short notice
(dynamic customers).
vi.

Emergency services: Emergency services comprise of police,

fire fighting and ambulance services. By definition, all
customers are dynamic. Moreover, the demand rate is usually
low so that vehicles become idle from time to time. In this
context, relocating idle vehicles in order to anticipate future
demands or to escape from downtown rush hour traffic jam is
a major issue.

vii. Taxi cab services: In taxi cab services, almost every customer
is dynamic. As in emergency services, relocating temporary
idle vehicles is an issue.
viii. Refuse collection: It is an activity rendering used products or
wastes and moving them to some points where further
treatment is taken care. In real life waste collection vehicle
routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), with
consideration of multiple disposal trips and drivers, with
workload balancing and compact route of each vehicle need to
be found.

8
ix.

Newspaper distribution: Distribution of newspaper is similar

to VRP, where it is to improve the distribution activity.
Distribution activity is a part of the strategic planning of the
company which aims to reduce number of staff members and
to reduce the cost occurred in the distribution process.

1.4

SOLUTION TECHNIQUES
Both exact and approximation algorithms are applied for solving

VRP and its variants. Many algorithms are developed for VRP, mostly
heuristics and metaheuristics are applied because the exact algorithms are not
guaranteed to find the optimal tours within reasonable computing time when
the numbers of cities are large.
1.4.1

Exact Algorithms for VRP

Exact methods guarantee that the optimal solution is found if the

method is given sufficient time and space. As stated initially, a simple

enumeration is out of question, so exact methods must use more clever
techniques. The worst case running time for NP-Hard problems are still going
to be high. Construction of exact algorithms that solve NP-hard problems in
polynomial time is possible, unless NP = P. For some classes of problems,
there are hopes of finding algorithms that solve problem instances occurring
in practice in reasonable time.
One of the most successful exact algorithm for solving CVRP is the
K-tree method of (Fisher 1994) that succeeded in solving a problem with 71
customers. However, there are smaller instances that have not been exactly
solved yet. To treat larger instances, or to compute solutions faster, heuristic
methods must be used. Ralphs et al (1995), implemented a parallel branchand-cut algorithm, and found an optimal solution for two instances and
provided a proof of optimality.

9
Exact methods such as branch-and-cut, branch-and-price and their
combination branch-cut-and-price are used to solve VRP (Wolsey 1998).
Blasum and Hochstttler (2000) used branch-and-cut for VRP. The best
algorithm based on two-index vehicle flow formulations is due to Naddef and
Rinaldi (2002). Toth and Vigo (2002) applied branch-and-bound for solving
VRP.
Laporte and Louveaux (1993) proposed an exact algorithm based
on the integer L-shaped method for solving stochastic VRP. Gendreau et al
(1995) have considered the SVRP in which both customers and their demand
are random and formulated it as a nonlinear stochastic integer program and
proposed a method based on L-shaped method.
1.4.2

Heuristic Algorithm for VRP

Heuristics are solution methods that can quickly find a feasible

solution with reasonable quality. There are no guarantees about the solution
quality though, it can be arbitrarily bad. The heuristics are based on these
experiments and tested empirically; comments about the quality of the
heuristic can be made. Heuristics are typically used for solving real life
problems because of their speed and their ability to handle large instances.
Several heuristic methods are proposed to search in a limited space
to produce good quality of result in a modest computational time for VRP,
which are broadly classified as:
Classical heuristics
Metaheuristics

10
1.4.2.1

Classical heuristics
Classical heuristics developed between 1960 and 1990. The class of

classical heuristics is divided into three groups: constructive heuristics, twophase heuristics and improvement methods.
Constructive heuristics
Laporte and Semet (2002) defined construction heuristics as
follows: Constructive heuristics gradually build a feasible solution while
keeping an eye on solution cost; they do not contain an improvement phase
per se. Many construction heuristics for vehicle routing problems have been
proposed during the last 40 years. Many construction heuristics for vehicle
routing problems are categorized into three classes: insertion heuristics,
savings heuristics, and clustering heuristics.
Insertion heuristics build a solution by inserting one customer at a
time. Insertion heuristics can build one route at a time (sequential insertion
heuristics) or build many or all routes parallelly (parallel insertion heuristics).
The choice of inserting a customer and where to insert a customer is what
differentiates the insertion heuristics. A very simple insertion heuristic could
choose to insert the customer that reduces the overall cost at least. The Mole
and Jameson (1976), expands one route at a time and Christofides et al (1979)
applies in turn sequential and parallel route construction procedures.
Savings heuristics initially build a solution where each customer is
served by a vehicle on its own route. Routes are then merged one by one
according to some criteria. Savings algorithms vary by the criterion used for
merging routes (that is, saving obtained by merging two routes) and also by
how routes are merged. For the CVRP, the most simple merge operation
deletes an edge between the depot and a customer from each of the two routes
that is being merged and joins the route by adding an edge between the two

11
customers that are adjacent to only one edge. More advanced merging
procedures consider all the customers served by the two routes and solve a
TSP (in case of the CVRP) on these customers.
The most widely used savings heuristics for VRP is Clarke and
Wright (1964) algorithm. It is based on the notion of savings. This algorithm
naturally applies to problems for which the number of vehicles is a decision
variable and it works equally well for directed or undirected problems.
Desrochers and Verhoog (1989) and Altinkemer and Gavish (1991) described
an interesting modification to the standard savings algorithm. Van Breedam
(1994) classifies the improvement operations as string cross, string
exchange, string relocation, and string mix, which can all be viewed as
special cases of 2-cyclic exchanges. Most savings algorithms have been
proposed for the CVRP. A new variant of the savings algorithm is given by
Altinel and ncan (2005).
Clustering algorithms are two-phase algorithms. The first phase
consists of grouping customers into subsets (clusters) where each subset
should be served by one route. The second phase then creates routes for each
subset. A third phase may be employed to repair the solution if it turns out
that some of the clusters could not be served by a single vehicle. Sweep
algorithm is a clustering approach for CVRP which is presented by Gillet and
Miller (1974). In practice, the algorithm works by sorting customers
according to their polar coordinate angle with the depot as (0, 0). The
algorithm starts from the first customer in the list and adds this customer to a
cluster. The algorithm continues to process the customers according to the
ordering and adds the customer to the current cluster as long as the cluster can
be served by a single vehicle. When it is no longer possible to add a customer
to the current cluster a new cluster is started and becomes the current cluster.
When all customers have been assigned to a cluster, a TSP tour is found for

12
each cluster to produce a CVRP solution. Fisher and Jaikumar (1981)
presented a clustering heuristic for the CVRP where the number of vehicles is
fixed to K. A generalized assignment problem is then solved. This produces K
clusters that each satisfies the capacity constraint. Each cluster is turned into a
route by solving a TSP to optimality. Talliards (1993) algorithm defines
neighborhood using the -interchange generation mechanism. A noble feature
of Talliards algorithm is the decomposition of the main problems into sub
problems. Salhi and Sari (1997) proposed three level composite heuristic to
solve MDVRP.
Two-phase heuristics
It is the one in which there are two heuristics used: clustering and
routing. Based on this, there are two types of heuristics: Cluster-first and
route-second and Route-first and cluster-second. In cluster-first and routesecond heuristics, the clusters are formed and then routes are framed within
each cluster. The above mentioned clustering algorithm solves VRP in this
manner. Route-first and cluster-second heuristics is a method in which the
first giant TSP is formed without considering the side constraints and then
decomposes this into vehicle routes based on the constraints. It had been first
put forward by Beasley (1983) who observed that the second phase problem is
a standard shortest path problem on an acyclic graph and can thus be solved in
O(n2) time.
Improvement methods
Local search heuristic methods 2-opt local exchange, Or-opt
exchange etc., are generally used as an improvement method in VRP, to
improve the routes of each vehicle. Funke et al (2005) used local heuristic for
solving VRP. They have used the terms best search for a steepest descent
algorithm and first search for a descent algorithm.

13
1.4.2.2

Metaheuristic methods
A special class of heuristics that has received special attention in

the last two decades is Metaheuristics. Metaheuristics provides general

frameworks for heuristics that can be applied to many problem classes. High
solution quality is often obtained using metaheuristics. Metaheuristics allow
deteriorating and even infeasible intermediary solutions in the course of the
search process. The best known metaheuristics developed for the VRP
typically identify better local optima than earlier heuristics, but they also tend
to be more time consuming. The six main types of metaheuristic methods that
have been applied to the VRP are Deterministic Annealing (DA), Simulated
Annealing (SA), Tabu Search (TS), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony
Optimization (ACO), and Neural Networks (NN). In recent years apart from
these metaheuristics, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Bee Colony
Optimization are applied to VRP in finding near optimal solution quickly.
Simulated Annealing
Teodorovic and Pavkovic (1992) build a SA-based algorithm for
VRP for stochastic case. Osmans (1993) implementation of simulated
annealing is much more involved, and also more successful. It uses a better
starting solution, some parameters of the algorithm are adjusted in a trial
phase, richer solution neighborhoods are explored, and the cooling schedule is
more sophisticated. The neighborhood structure of this algorithm uses a interchange generation mechanism in which two routes p and q are first
selected, together with two subsets of customers Sp and Sq, one from each
route, satisfying |Sp

and |Sq

. The operation swaps the customers of Sp

with those of Sq as long as this is feasible. The algorithm that is implemented

is tested on symmetric VRPs with an unspecified number of vehicles.

14
Van Breedam (1995) compared and tested several version of SA
using different neighborhood structures. Tests are conducted on the 14
Christofides, Mingozzi, and Toth instances. These experiments are useful to
identify best SA strategies, but overall they confirm the superiority of tabu
search-based heuristics.
Tabu Search
One of the first attempt to apply tabu search to the VRP is due to
Willard (1989). The solution is first transformed into a giant tour by
replication of the depot, and neighborhoods are defined as all feasible
solutions that can be reached from the current solution by means of 2-opt or
3-opt exchanges. The next solution is determined by the best non-tabu move.
In Osman (1993), neighborhoods are again defined by means of -interchange
generation mechanism, with

=2. This includes a combination of 2-opt

moves, vertex reassignments to different routes, and vertex interchanges

between two routes. In one version of the algorithm called BA (Best
Admissible), the whole neighborhood is explored and the best non-tabu
feasible move is selected. In the other version, FBA (First Best Admissible),
the first admissible improving move is selected if one exists; otherwise, the
best admissible move is implemented. The different versions of TS applied to
VRP are adaptative memory procedure (Rochat and Taillard 1995), network
flow TS (Xu and Kelly 1996). Gendreau et al (1996) developed a tabu search
heuristic using a proxy for the objective function in order to efficiently
evaluate potential moves for VRP with stochastic demand and stochastic
customer. Granular Tabu for VRP had been proposed by Toth and Vigo
(2003) to VRP and its application.

15
Genetic Algorithm
Thangiah and Gubbi (1993) used genetic algorithm to find good
cluster of customers for VRP with cluster first and route second. Another
GA application for the time-constrained CVRP may be found in Schmitt
(1994, 1995). An interesting feature of this work is that a route-first, clustersecond approach is used, thus allowing the classical path representation
(without separators) to be used. The implementation proposed by Schmitt
(1995) uses the Order Crossover operator and a Swap mutation operator,
where two randomly selected vertices exchange their position. To improve the
performance of the GA, this mutation operator is then replaced by a 2-opt
local search method. GA with neighborhood search method is adopted by
Baker et al (2003). They proved that the results are competitive with TS and
SA. Yi-Liang Xu et al (2005) in their paper, proposed three genetic
representations for VRP. They used fuel truck dispatch system data set for
their investigation with hybrid GA and 2-opt routing optimization technique.
A hybrid algorithm based on GA and TS for solving CVRP is studied by
Guido et al (2008), where they described two simple heuristics and introduced
a new genetic operator namely chain mutation. The work done on the CVRP,
including its distance or time-constrained variant, is mostly aimed at
evaluating the impact of different components or parameters of a GA on the
efficiency of the search. Many researches have been done in VRPSD using
GA. Ismail and Irhamah (2008) proposed a new scheme based on a hybrid
GA and TS heuristic for VRPSD with preventive restocking. The Breeder
Genetic Algorithm (BGA) is also proposed to solve VRPSD by Irhamah and
Ismail (2009). BGA is powerful and reliable in global searching than GA.
Ant Systems
Bullnheimer et al (1997), in their paper developed a hybrid ant
systems in which each vehicle route produced in a given iteration is improved
by the 2-opt heuristic before trail update. This algorithm also uses terms

16
related to vehicle capacity and distance savings with respect to the depot
when selecting the next vertex to be visited. In the trail update step, they use a
number of elitist ants to account for the best solution found so far
(these ants are assumed to always travel on this best solution). Their
computational experiments on the 14 problems of Christofides, Mingozzi, and
Toth indicate that the addition of a 2-opt step and the use of elitist ants are
clearly beneficial. Kawamura et al (1998) proposed a complex hybrid variant
of AS that involves 2-opt improvement procedures and probabilistic
acceptance rules reminiscent of simulated annealing. The method is applied to
two geometric 30 and 60 customer instances and it identified the optimal
solution in both cases. No other tests are performed, which makes it difficult
to assess the effectiveness of this procedure.
1.5

PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population based

evolutionary computation technique developed by Eberhart and Kennedy

(Eberhart and Kennedy 1995; Kennedy and Eberhart 1995), inspired by social
behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling. The PSO concept originated as a
simulation of a simplified social system. The original intent is to graphically
simulate the graceful, unpredictable choreography of collision-proof birds in a
flock. Then, this simulation is modified by incorporating nearest neighbor
velocity, multidimensional search and acceleration, eliminating ancillary
variables. During the evolution of algorithms, it is realized at some point that
the model is an optimizer. A simple original algorithm (Eberhart et al 1996)
is the result after eliminating number of parameters during the process of trial
and error.

17
1.5.1

Components of PSO

The main components of PSO are

Swarm of particles that represent the population of solutions
Each particle represents a candidate solution
Elements of a particle represent parameters to be optimized
The

PSO

is

initialized

with

population

of

random

solutions/particles. Each particle is treated as a point and has two attribute

values: position and velocity. The particle keeps track of its coordinates in
the problem space which are associated with the best solution (fitness) it has
achieved so far and is called as pbest. Another best value that is tracked by
the particle swarm optimizer is the best value, obtained so far by any particle
in the neighbors of the particle. This location is called lbest. When a particle
takes all the population as its topological neighbors, the best value is a global
best and is called gbest. The particles fly through the problem space in each
generation by following pbest and gbest values.
1.5.2

Procedure for PSO

The size of swarm is I and each particle is of dimension n. The ith

particle is represented by Xi=(xi1,xi2,xin). The gbest and pbest solutions are

represented Pg=(pg1,pg2,pg3pgn) and Pi=(pi1,pi2,pi3pin) respectively. The
velocity rate of ith particle is Vi=(vi1,vi2,vi3vin).
The implementation of PSO is outlined as follows (Eberhart and
Shi 2001).
1.

Initialize the swarm of particles with random positions and

velocities on n dimensions in the problem space

18
2.

Repeat

the steps 3 5, until maximum iterations T or

minimum error criteria is attained

3.

For each particle,

a.

Evaluate the desired optimization fitness function in n

variables

b.

Compare particles fitness with particles pbest. If the

current value is better, then store pbest value equal to
current value using Equation (1.1) and (1.2)
),
),

= 1
> 1

(1.1)
,
,

4.

= 1
> 1

(1.2)

Compare fitness with the populations overall previous best. If

current value is better, then store the current value as the gbest
value using Equation (1.3) and (1.4)
= max (

)
(

5.

(1.3)

= 1
)

(1.4)

= 1

For each particle,

a.

Change the velocity and position of the particle

according to the Equations (1.5) and (1.6), respectively

( + 1)

( )

( )

( ) +

( )

( )

(1.5)

( + 1)

( )

( + 1)

(1.6)

where 1 i I, 1 j n, cp, cg are learning factors / acceleration

constants, r1 and r2 is a random number between 0 and 1, w is
a inertia factor, vij(t) is the velocity of the ith particle in the tth
iteration of jth dimension, xij(t) is the jth position of the ith

19
particle in the tth iteration. cp and cg represent the cognitive
and social parameters.
The equation (1.2) and (1.4) stores the pbest and gbest of particles.
The equation (1.5) helps each particle to move towards the best of the
obtained solution by calculating the difference between its current position
value and the pbest or gbest value. This difference value guides the particle to
move towards the optimal or near optimal solution in due course. Searching in
PSO by using cognitive and social component for dth position of ith particle is
shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 Searching Diagram of PSO

The velocity updates are done in two ways:
Synchronous mode in which best position is updated only
after all particles positions and personal best positions have
been updated.
Asynchronous mode in which the best position found is
updated immediately after each particles position update.
They lead to faster propagation of best solution.

20

1.5.3

Variants of PSO
PSO has undergone a number of changes from its beginning. Most

of these changes affect the velocity update of the particle. Kennedy and
Eberhart (2001), Engelbrecht (2005), Clerc (2006), and Poli et al (2007),
detailed the description of many PSO variants.
Most particle swarm optimization algorithms are designed to search
in continuous domains. However, there are a number of variants that operate
in discrete spaces. It is of two types: Binary PSO (Kennedy and Eberhart
1997) and integer PSO (Parsopoulos and Vrahatis 2002).
The constriction coefficient is introduced as an outcome of a
theoretical analysis of swarm dynamics. It is the first method to control the
explosion of the swarm and developed by Clerc and Kennedy (2002).
The bare-bones particle swarm (Kennedy 2003) is a version of the
particle swarm optimization algorithm in which the velocity- and positionupdate rules are substituted by a procedure that samples a parametric
probability density function.
In the standard particle swarm optimization algorithm, a particle is
attracted towards its best neighbor. A variant in which a particle uses the
information provided by all its neighbors in order to update its velocity is
called the fully informed particle swarm (FIPS) (Mendes et al 2004).
1.5.4

Hybrid PSO
Other evolutionary computation capabilities are incorporated to

PSO as hybrid PSO or the adaptation of PSO parameters for better

performance as adaptive PSO. PSO also required to work under complex

21
environments such as multi-objective or constraint optimization problem or
tracking dynamic systems.
Many researchers incorporated selection, mutation, crossover as
well as Differential Evolution (DE) into PSO algorithm. The main goal is to
increase the diversity of the population by:
1.

Preventing the particles to move close to each other and

collide (Krink et al 2002).

2.

Self-adapt parameters such as the constriction factor,

acceleration constants (Miranda and Fonseca 2002) or inertia
weight (Lovbjerg and Krink 2002)

Selection procedure and self-adapting properties for its parameters

are incorporated to PSO algorithm. Angeline (1998) incorporated tournament
selection used in EP to PSO. Miranda and Fonseca (2002) introduced self
adaption capabilities to swarm by modifying the concept of a particle to
include, not only the objective parameters, but also set of strategic parameters.
PSO algorithm is included with differential evolution operator to
improve its performance in two ways:
1.

To avoid falling into local minima (Zhang and Xie 2003).

2.

To find the optimal parameters such as inertia and acceleration

constants for canonical PSO (Kannan et al 2004).

Gaussian mutation is combined for updating the velocities and

position of particles (Higashi and Iba 2003). Unimodal and multimodal
functions are tested. The improvement of standard PSO is done by inclusion
of mutation or a simple replacement of the best fitted value. El-Dib et al
(2004) applied the reproduction system of GA to PSO that modifies both the
position and velocity vectors of randomly selected particles in order to reach

22
the optimum. Along with mutation, crossover and elitism are incorporated by
Juang (2004). The new generation of populations are generated half by elites
and remaining by crossover and mutation.
The SA-PSO is presented by Chaojun and Zulian (2006). The
disadvantage of getting into the local best point of standard PSO is overcome
effectively and the ability of global optimality are toned up.
A novel Condensed Hybrid Optimization algorithm using Enhanced
Continuous Tabu Search (ECTS) and PSO is proposed by Chen-Hung (2009). The
ECTS is modified TS, which has good search capabilities on large search spaces.
Turbulent PSO (TPSO) is hybridized with fuzzy logic controller
(Liu and Abraham 2005) to produce Fuzzy Adaptive TPSO (FATPSO) to
adaptively regulate the velocity parameters during an optimization run, thus
enabling coarse-grained explosive searches to occur before being replaced by
fine-grained exploitation later. The problem with both high and low
dimensions performs well with TPSO and FATPSO.
1.5.5

Applications of PSO
Like any other evolutionary algorithms, PSO can be applied to solve

most of the optimization problems. The potential application areas of PSO are:
System design (Eberhart and Shi 1998; Kennedy 2001;
Eberhart and shi 2001)
Multi-objective optimization (Tandon 2000)
Power system (Yoshida et al 1999)
Classification (Wang et al 2007; Chia-chong 2006; Alba et al 2007)
Pattern recognition (Sugisaka and Fan 2005)

23
Biological system modeling and diagnosis (Eberhart and Hu
1999)
Dynamic System (Eberhart and Shi 2001)
Scheduling (planning)
Signal processing
Games
Robotic applications
Decision making
Simulation and identification, etc.
PSO can solve variety of optimization problems, especially in the
field of multi-dimensional continuous space optimization problems.
Expressing the particle position is not easy, hence it is restricted in the
application of COP. Many recent researches are mostly in the application of
PSO to COP. The main COPs addressed by PSO are:
Scheduling
o

Job shop scheduling

Flow shop scheduling, etc.

Routing

1.5.5.1

Traveling Salesman Problem

Vehicle Routing Problem

Scheduling
PSO is applied for solving task assignment problem by Salman et al

(2002). PSO is hybrid with Hill Climbing (HC) algorithm as a local search

24
method for solving task assignment in distributed systems (Peng-Yeng et al
2006). Bo Liua et al (2008) implemented the flow shop scheduling with
limited buffers. They proposed a hybrid PSO for solving the flow shop
scheduling, where permutation encoding is used for representing the particles.
1.5.5.2

Routing
The fuzzy discrete PSO (Pang et al 2004) is a matrix based

approach where the TSP is represented as a matrix containing the set of cities
and the TSP sequences. The particle position is a fuzzy matrix, the values of
which represent the degree of membership to the corresponding elements of
the TSP matrix. PSO is combined with Fast Local Search and GA concepts to
guide the particle movement at macro level (exploration) and to improve the
solution locally (exploitation). Lopes and Coelho, (2005) and Habibi et al
(2006) also developed a hybrid PSO, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and
SA are incorporated by them. The ACO algorithm replaces the individual best
element of PSO, whilst the cooling process of SA is used to control the
exploration of the group best element, both of which are then applied within
the PSO framework. There are many researches work done in the area of VRP
using PSO. The following section explains in detail.
1.5.6

Literature Survey for VRP using PSO

Ning et al (2004), Luo and Shi (2006) and Shao et al (2009) adopted

a mixed approach of Global and Local version of PSO (GL-PSO), for solving
VRP, Vehicle Routing Problem with stochastic travel time, Vehicle Routing
Problem with non-full load. The PSO is hybrid with SA for solving VRP
(Liu and Shi 2006; Zhang et al 2006; Chen et al 2006; Ma et al 2007). In
SA-PSO, (Yang and Qian 2008) adopted 2-opt exchange method to construct
neighborhood solution.

25
Zhang and Wu (2008) applied Fitness-Distance- Ratio based PSO
(FDR-PSO) to facility VRP. Social learning behaviors of a particle in
FDR-PSO include not only the gbest but also the nbest. The nbest is the best
positions visited by the near neighbors of a particle, and accomplished by
selecting a particle that maximizes the ratio of the fitness difference to the
one-dimensional distance. GLNPSO is a multiple social structure technique
that is built by combining the three well-known social structures: gbest, lbest,
and nbest.
Multi-depot VRP is solved by Wang et al (2007) by proposing a
hybrid optimization algorithm which is composed of PSO and improved
ACO. Order numbers for vehicles to freight are got by particle position
vector, single vehicle route is got by ACO, and then evaluated and filtered
particles according to optimal vehicle routes, circulated until terminate
qualification.
A hybrid algorithm of PSO with TS algorithm is proposed by Zhao
et al (2008) for solving multi-depots single vehicle routing problem. They
used particle position matrix expression. The results showed that VRP model
and algorithm are effective and offerd a way to multi-depots single. Ai, and
Kachitvichyanukul (2008) proposed an adaptive version of PSO based on the
social structure of GL-PSO. This method has additional capability to selfadapt its inertia weight (w). The w is controlled so that the balance between
exploration and exploitation phases of the swarm is maintained. The
performance of this adaptive PSO is evaluated for solving VRP instances.
The recent publication of GLNPSO algorithm is resolving CVRP
(Ai and Kachitvichyanukul 2007) and VRPSPD (Ai and Kachitvichyanukul
2009). It is tested on VRPSPD and CVRP using benchmark data sets
available from literatures and it is competitive with other published results.

26
Ai, and Kachitvichyanukul, (2009) proposed two solution
representations for solving the CVRP using GL-PSO: SR-1 and SR-2. The
computational result shows that SR-1 and SR-2 is competitive with other
methods for solving CVRP in terms of solution quality and computational
time. The solution representation of SR-1 with n customers and m vehicles
requires a particle with (n+2m) dimension. Each particle dimension is
encoded as a real number. The first n dimensions represent priorities of
customers; each customer is represented by one dimension. The other 2m
dimensions are related to vehicles, each vehicle is represented by two
dimensions. The solution representation of SR-2 consists of 3m dimensional
particle and each particle dimension is encoded as a real number. All
dimensions are related to vehicles, each vehicle is represented by three
dimensions: two dimensions for the reference point and one dimension for the
vehicle coverage radius. SR-2 starts with the transformation of particle to the
vehicle orientation points and the vehicle coverage radius. The vehicle routes
are then constructed based on these points and radius.

A feasible route

consisting of customers that are located inside its coverage area and have not
been assigned to other vehicle is constructed for each vehicle. Vehicle
coverage area is defined as an area inside a circle centered at its reference
point within its coverage radius.
In (Sombuntham and Kachitvichayanukul 2010) improved PSO is
applied for solving MDVRP in which mutation and improved inertia are used.
MDVRP with pickup and delivery is solved using PSO with multiple social
learning structures in (Zhang and Ye 2010).
1.6

MOTIVATION FOR THE RESEARCH

The PSO is an emerging metaheuristic technique, and considered to

be very simple and consistent than other popular metaheuristic and

evolutionary methods. It has wide variety of application areas as discussed in

27
section 1.5. Particle encoding for COP are difficult and complex, because of
which there is a large scope of research in applying PSO to solve COP. This
motivated to perform research in the area of PSO to COP like VRP. The
efficient and effective representation of particles to solve COP is the objective
of this research. The PSO particles represent the customer sequence. These
customers are to be serviced by a vehicle with minimum total cost of
servicing. The space and time complexity are to be reduced.
The implementation of VRP is considered as they become
ubiquitous today. VRP span a wide variety of industries and involve the
commercial distribution of many products that range from newspapers to soft
drinks to groceries to milk on a daily basis. Beyond the commercial
distribution setting, there are applications that involve waste collection, street
sweeping, and delivery of mail. Even after fifty decade, there is more research
undergoing in this area, because of its complexity as explained in section 1.1.
1.7

OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

The main objective of this research is to propose hybrid PSO for

solving VRP. The proposed hybrid PSO can be applied for solving different
types of VRP and scheduling problems. Four different hybrid PSO algorithms
are proposed to minimize the route cost and also to reduce the time and space
complexity of hybrid PSO algorithms to solve VRP. The algorithm suites well
for any type of combinatorial problem like assignment, partitioning, routing,
and scheduling. VRP is the COP considered to perform posteriori testing of
the proposed algorithm and it is compared with other existing State-of-the-Art
methods. The variants of VRP that are considered in this research for testing
the PSO algorithm are
Capacitated VRP, and

28
VRP with Stochastic Demands,
Multi-depot VRP
The main objectives of this research are
1. To propose a new Hybrid PSO (HPSO) with GA operators to
minimize the route cost of vehicle of CVRP. Discrete PSO with
integer coding is used to represent the particles of PSO. It makes
the algorithm easy to model and implement. It also reduces the
space and time when compared to other existing PSO methods. To
minimize the route cost of each vehicle hill-climbing with 2-opt
local exchange is incorporated.
2. To extend the proposed HPSO to work for stochastic nature of
VRP. The Dynamic Programming (DP) is included to handle this
stochastic nature where probability distribution is known rather
than the actual value.
3. To propose a new algorithm named Modified k-means with HPSO
(MK-HPSO). It divides the customer into groups based on their
distance and demand and then actual route is formed within each
group by HPSO, thus minimizing the route cost.
4. To propose a Nested PSO (NPSO) to solve CVRP that consists of
master PSO and slave PSO. Master PSO partition the customer into
groups and slave PSO forms the route such that the cost is
minimized.
Proposed algorithms such as HPSO, MK-HPSO and NPSO are also
applied to a variant of VRP, i.e., MDVRP. A small modification is made in all
proposed algorithms. A general k-means algorithm is first applied to
preprocess the MDVRP data thus reducing it to multiple VRPs. Then, each
VRP is handled with the proposed hybrid algorithms.

29
All algorithms are implemented in MatLab 7.0.1 with Pentium 4.0, 2.3
GHz processor and tested with Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP)
Bench mark problem instances of Augerat et al set A, Augerat et al set B,
Augerat et al set P, Christofides and Eilon. MDVRP problem instances from
Christofides and Eilon, Gillett and Johnson, Chao et al are used to validate the
performance of the proposed algorithms. The data set along with the Best
Known Solution (BKS) is available at http://www.branchandcut.org and
http://neo.lcc.uma.es/radi-aeb/WebVRP/.
1.8

ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS

Chapter 1 introduces the PSO and VRP. It describes about the PSO,

its variants and application. This chapter also discusses the evolution of VRP, its
application, variants and solution methodologies. It also covers the motivation
and objective of research and gives the outline of the research work.
Chapter 2 deals with the first work of research. The particle swarm
optimization is applied along with genetic operators (HPSO) to solve
deterministic COP such as CVRP. A two-phase heuristic technique route-first
and cluster-second is adapted. The giant sequences of customers are the
particles of HPSO. They are represented as permutation of integers. HPSO
generate the initial particles using Nearest Neighbor Heuristic (NNH) and
random permutation. Steepest descent Hill-Climbing (HC) with 2-opt
operator is incorporated to improve the quality of particles. The particles are
converted to particle position before applying the velocity and GA operator.
The varying inertia is used for updating the velocities to avoid trapping into
local optima. GA operators two-point crossover with gbest and pbest and
swap or inverse mutation is performed for randomly selected particles. While
generating the swarm for next iteration, elites are considered to preserve the
best particles in further generation. The computational complexity is also
analyzed. This HPSO is tested with CVRP dataset and compared with other
existing PSO works. The proposed HPSO algorithm is also used in solving a

30
Multiple Depot Vehicle Routing Problem. The objective of MDVRP is to
minimize the total travel length of vehicles stationed at multiple depots.The
MDVRP may be split into multiple single VRP making it easy to solve. The
splitting of MDVRP into sub problems is taken care by general k-means
algorithm that assigns the customers around the depot. This reduces the
MDVRP to multiple single-depot VRP. The HPSO algorithm is then used for
solving each VRP. It is tested with MDVRP bench mark problem instances
and results are compared with other existing metaheuristic works.
Chapter 3 extends HPSO for stochastic VRP such as VRPSD. The
requirement/demand of customers is considered to be random in this
stochastic VRP. HPSO is incorporated with Dynamic Programming (DP) to
provide solution for such VRP. Apriori sequences of customers are generated
by HPSO and dynamic programming is incorporated within HPSO to
calculate the cost of generated apriori sequence. Backward recursion is used
in DP to solve objective function of stochastic VRP where only the
probabilities of customers demands are known. The HPSO-DP is tested with
VRPSD random data set and it is compared with other metaheuristic
techniques such as GA and PSO.
Chapter 4 deals with solving VRP by cluster-first and route-second
approach. It results in dividing the problem into a number of sub problems to
handle them easily. The modified k-means algorithm is proposed for
clustering and a HPSO is used for sequencing the customers within the
clusters such that their cost of servicing is minimized. The modified k-means
algorithm is improved by adding a priority measure. This also selects the
initial centroids based on the distance of customer from the depot. The
number of clusters formed is equal to the number of vehicles available. This
algorithm is tested with CVRP data set. It is also applied for solving MDVRP
and tested with benchmark problem instances of MDVRP. The results are also
compared with other existing metaheuristic methods and HPSO.

31
Chapter 5 provides the Nested PSO (NPSO) for solving CVRP.
NPSO consists of Master PSO and Slave PSO. Master PSO deals with
assigning the customers to a vehicle. While assigning the customers, it deals
with the capacity constraint of a vehicle. This master PSO uses redundant
representation as its particle. Then the slave PSO deals with forming the
sequence of customers serviced by the respective vehicle. It minimizes the
routing cost of a vehicle. The proposed NPSO is tested with CVRP data set
and is also compared with other proposed and existing State-of-the-Art
methods. The NPSO is also tested with MDVRP data set and compared with
other HPSO and MK-HPS methods.
Chapter 6 summarizes the work, draws the conclusions and
provides suggestion for future work.