Artificial bee colony algorithm for two-dimensional loading capacitated vehicle routing problem

The artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) with three loading heuristics for the two-dimensional loading capacitated vehicle routing problem (2L-CVRP) is presented in the paper. The 2L-CVRP is a combination of two well-known NP-hard problems, the capacitated vehicle routing problem, and the two-dimensional bin packing problem. It is very difficult to get a good performance solution in practice for these problems. The problem is solved by different heuristics for the loading part, and by artificial bee colony algorithm for the overall optimization. To solve the representation problem of the solution, a novel real encoding is presented to represent the solution for ABC. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is tested, and proven by extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances.