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A novel membrane algorithm for capacitated vehicle routing problem

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Abstract

This study is focused on solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) by applying a novel membrane algorithm based on ant colony optimization (MA_ACO). The effect of non-determinism on the performance of the membrane algorithm is also studied in this work. In this approximate approach model, a membrane system is considered to be a non-deterministic distributed parallel framework, and ant colony optimization (ACO) is used as a sub-algorithm of elementary membranes. With the purpose of maintaining balance between the convergence rate and the population diversity, MA_ACO supports sub-algorithms for elementary membranes based on two types of ACO. The elementary membranes send their best solutions to the skin membrane. In the next step, the best one in the skin membrane is sent back to every inner membrane with a fixed probability. All of the elementary membranes have thus a chance to receive the best result and make changes to the current search direction. Thirty benchmark problems of CVRP are utilized to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed membrane algorithm. Experimental results show that compared with other algorithms proposed in the previous literature, our algorithm is very competitive. The new best solutions for seven instances are also listed.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61127005, 61373066, 61033003, 60903105 and 30870826), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2010ZD001 and NKZXB1110).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yunyun Niu

  2. Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Department of Control Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Shuo Wang & Juanjuan He

  3. The Research Center of Logistics, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China

    Jianhua Xiao

Authors
  1. Yunyun Niu
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  2. Shuo Wang
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  3. Juanjuan He
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  4. Jianhua Xiao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jianhua Xiao.

Additional information

Communicated by M. J. Watts.

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Niu, Y., Wang, S., He, J. et al. A novel membrane algorithm for capacitated vehicle routing problem. Soft Comput 19, 471–482 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-014-1266-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-014-1266-0

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