Distance related: a procedure for applying directly Artificial Bee Colony algorithm in routing problems

The aim of the present paper is to introduce an innovative algorithmic approach, the Distance Related Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (DRABC), as a variant of the original Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The aforementioned approach has been employed in the solution of the team orienteering problem (TOP). TOP fits into the category of vehicle routing problems with Profits, and such, each node is associated with a score value. The objective of the TOP is the formation of feasible routes with respect to a total travel time limit that corresponds to the total score value maximization. Summarizing the proposed approach, the algorithm applies the original equations of the ABC, on accordingly encoded solution vectors, namely on vectors that present the Euclidean distance between consecutive nodes in a route. This process is combined with a decoding method, to express the solution vector as an ordered sequence of nodes. This encoding/decoding method is referred to as Distance Related procedure. The proposed approach achieves most of the best known solutions of the benchmark instances found in the literature, and the performance of the DRABC algorithm is compared to others regarding the solution of the TOP.