Intelligent water drops a new optimization algorithm for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, seeking to serve a number of customers with a fleet of available vehicles. VRP is an important optimization problem in the field of transportation, distribution and logistics. To date, several exact and approximate approaches have been proposed to solve VRP. Here, we apply a population based algorithm to VRP by imitating the natural flow of water drops. The “Intelligent Water Drops” or IWD algorithm solves the VRP by modeling how water drops collectively modify their environment by picking up dirt from river bottoms during moving downhill and leaving sediments (such as on beaches) when slowing down. The computational results for fourteen benchmark VRP problems are reported and compared to several other metaheuristic approaches.