A Hybrid Bat Algorithm with Path Relinking for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an NP-hard problem with wide engineering and theoretical background. In this paper, a hybrid bat algorithm with path relinking (HBA-PR) is proposed to solve CVRP. The HBA-PR is constructed based on the framework of continuous bat algorithm; the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and path relinking are effectively integrated into bat algorithm. Moreover, in order to further improve the performance, the random subsequences and single-point local search are operated with certain loudness (probability). In order to verify the validity of the method in this paper, and it's efficiency and with other existing methods, several classical CVRP instances from three classes of CVRP benchmarks are selected to tested. Experimental results and comparisons show that the HBA-PR is effective for CVRP.