The Bees Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Enhanced Bees Algorithm, a new meta-heuristic for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem, achieving near-optimal solutions efficiently for practical dispatch scenarios.

Contribution

It adapts the Bees Algorithm for vehicle routing, demonstrating competitive accuracy and fast runtime performance compared to existing methods.

Findings

Achieves solutions within 0.5% of optimal for benchmark problems

Produces results within 2% of optimal in 60 seconds

Suitable for real-world dispatch scenarios

Abstract

In this thesis we present a new algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem called the Enhanced Bees Algorithm. It is adapted from a fairly recent algorithm, the Bees Algorithm, which was developed for continuous optimisation problems. We show that the results obtained by the Enhanced Bees Algorithm are competitive with the best meta-heuristics available for the Vehicle Routing Problem (within 0.5% of the optimal solution for common benchmark problems). We show that the algorithm has good runtime performance, producing results within 2% of the optimal solution within 60 seconds, making it suitable for use within real world dispatch scenarios.