Capacitated vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) involves minimizing total route length while visiting each customer location exactly once. In capacitated vehicle routing problem the nodal demand of the vehicle need to be satisfied. For large scale problem use of clustering approach can improve the solution. In this paper an effective modified partition clustering approach has been proposed. The main purpose of proposed partition clustering approach is to divide the entire area into small clusters and to consider the nodal demand of each vehicle while forming the clusters; then each cluster is solved as vehicle routing problem using ant colony optimization. The proposed partition clustering approach has improved the efficiency of the solution. Experimental result shows that the proposed clustering approach is better than the previously used k-means clustering approach.