Efficient Heuristics for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Problems Using Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper addresses the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) with a homogenous fleet of vehicles serving a large customer base. The authors propose a multi-phase heuristic that clusters the nodes based on proximity, orients them along a route, and allots vehicles. For the final phase of determining the routes for each vehicle, they have developed a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach. Benchmark datasets as well as hypothetical datasets have been used for computational trials. The proposed heuristic is found to perform exceedingly well even for large problem instances, both in terms of quality of solutions and in terms of computational effort.