Research on the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows Using Firefly Algorithm

Abstract

As a key factor of logistics distribution, vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a hot research topic in management and computation science. In this paper the principle and algorithm process of firefly algorithm are introduced in detail. Then the algorithm process and solving steps are designed for vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), including the coding and design of disturbance mechanism of elicit fireflies. In the end, the testing examples from benchmark and other literatures are conducted with good outputs, which prove the validity of the firefly algorithm for VRP.