A probability matrix based particle swarm optimization for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Particle swam optimization (PSO) is a relatively new metaheuristic that has recently drawn much attention from researchers in various optimization areas. However, application of PSO for the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is very limited. This paper proposes a simple PSO approach for solving the CVRP. The proposed PSO approach uses a probability matrix as the main device for particle encoding and decoding. While existing research used the PSO solely for assignment of customers to routes and used other algorithms to sequence customers within the routes, the proposed approach applies the PSO approach to both simultaneously. The computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed PSO approach compared to the previous approaches.