A New Hybrid Path Relinking Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

This paper presents a new hybrid path relinking algorithm called ACO&PR algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic approach, which simulates the decision-making processes of ant colonies as they forage for food and find the most efficient routes from their nests to food sources. Due to its constructive nature, we hybridize the solution construction mechanism of ACO with path relinking (PR), an evolutionary method, which introduces progressively attributes of the guiding solution into the initial solution to obtain the high quality solution as quickly as possible. The experimental results for benchmark VRP instances have shown that our proposed method is competitive to solve the vehicle routing problem compared with the best existing methods in terms of solution quality.