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

Abstract

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.

Sustainable supply chain modeling and analysis: Past debate, present problems and future challenges

“…9 shows that manufacturing (tangible products) industries constitute a large proportion of the previous research, such as the computer & electronic product manufacturing industry and the transportation equipment manufacturing industry. One of the reasons is that most successful manufacturing organizations have an opportunity to achieve higher performance in pursuit of SSCM, which is a common practice across manufacturing industries (Chow, 2015;Ghadimi et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018). Recent decades have seen the rapid economy evolution from a manufacturing base to a service orientation.…”

A novel method for green delivery mode considering shared vehicles in the IoT environment

“…As a basic model for solving path optimization issues, the VRP model has been extended to different application scenarios, including VRP with time windows, VRP with backhauls, (Mu et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2018). However, these models are not yet fully adapted to solve the issue of considering two-stage shared delivery.…”

Recent advances of bat-inspired algorithm, its versions and applications

“…This technique may assist the optimization process in determining the values for the parameters and determining the optimum solutions. The parameters of BA have been adopted during the search by several studies [ 50 , 126 , 133 , 220 , 246 , 303 ].…”

“…An adaptive BA version was proposed to address truck and trailer routing problems optimally [ 303 ]. The primary aim of proposing the adaptive BA is to provide an automation tuning strategy for the parameters and enhance the BA’s local search capabilities and find a better solution.…”