Multi-objective optimisation for the vehicle routing problem using metaheuristics

The capacitated vehicle routing problem is a combinatorial optimisation problem that determines a set of routes of minimum distance to deliver the goods, using a fleet of identical vehicles with restricted capacity. The objective of this article it to optimise the total distance required to deliver the goods and also the workload imbalance in terms of distances travelled by the vehicles and their loads. Due to the combinatorial in nature, it requires metaheuristic to solve these types of problems and this is a rapidly growing field of research. Here two metaheuristics such as ant colony optimisation (ACO) and simulated annealing (SA) are proposed and analysed for solving this multi-objective formulation of the vehicle routing problem. The results obtained from these two methods were compared and found that the ACO gives better results than the SA for the VRP.