Solving capacitated vehicle routing problem using intelligent water drops algorithm

Abstract

The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a well-known NP-hard problem of importance to real life applications such as transportation and logistics. The CVRP finds the best set of paths between a specific number of customers to deliver goods by a number of vehicles with a fixed capacity. In this paper, we apply a new nature inspired optimization algorithm called Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) inspired by water flow. The results of this IWD approach are compared against a classical approach and show that IWD algorithm gives optimal and near optimal solutions for some CVRP instances.