A self-adaptive bat algorithm for the truck and trailer routing problem

• Published in: Engineering computations Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 108 - 135
• Main Authors: Wang, Chao, Zhou, Shengchuan, Gao, Yang, Liu, Chao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford Emerald Publishing Limited 01.01.2018; Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subjects: Adaptive algorithms; Algorithms; Combinatorial analysis; Computational efficiency; Computing time; Customers; Design; Heuristic; Heuristic methods; Milk; Optimization; Route planning; Tractor trailers; Trucks; Vehicle routing; Vehicles; Norway; Self-adaptive; Truck and trailer; Bat algorithm; Vehicle routing
• ISSN: 0264-4401; 1758-7077
• DOI: 10.1108/EC-11-2016-0408

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an effective solution method for the truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP) which is one of the important NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems owing to its multiple real-world applications. It is a generalization of the famous vehicle routing problem (VRP), involving a group of geographically scattered customers served by the vehicle fleet including trucks and trailers. Design/methodology/approach The meta-heuristic solution approach based on bat algorithm (BA) in which a local search procedure performed by five different neighborhood structures is developed. Moreover, a self-adaptive (SA) tuning strategy to preserve the swarm diversity is implemented. The effectiveness of the proposed SA-BA is investigated by an experiment conducted on 21 benchmark problems that are well known in the literature. Findings Computational results indicate that the proposed SA-BA algorithm is computationally efficient through comparison with other existing algorithms found from the literature according to solution quality. As for the actual computational time, the SA-BA algorithm outperforms others. However, the scaled computational time of the SA-BA algorithm underperforms the other algorithms. Originality/value In this work the authors show that the proposed SA-BA is effective as a method for the TTRP problem. To the authors’ knowledge, the BA has not been applied previously, as in this work, to solve the TTRP problem.