Evaluating of the particle swarm optimization in a periodic vehicle routing problem

This paper presents a new mathematical model for measuring and evaluating efficiency of periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP) that arises in a competitive environment. In the competitive environment several distributors are in competition and arriving to the customers earlier than other competitors affect amount of the sale. The main objectives are to minimize the travel cost and maximize the sale to serve customers before other rival distributors. To measuring the efficiency of the problem an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm is proposed and it compared with an original PSO algorithm in terms of accuracy. Computational results indicate that the improved PSO algorithm performs well in terms of accuracy but the original PSO performs better in computational time. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.