Particle swarm optimization for the vehicle routing problem: a survey and a comparative analysis

Summarization: In the last few years, a number of books and survey papers devoted to the vehicle routing problem (VRP) or to its variants or to the methods used for the solution of one or more variants of the VRP have been published. Also, in these years, the field of swarm intelligence algorithms has had a significant growth. One of the most important swarm intelligence algorithms is the particle swarm optimization (PSO). Although the particle swarm optimization was first published in 1995, it took around 10 years in order researchers to publish papers using a PSO algorithm for the solution of variants of the VRP. However, in the last 10 years, many journal papers, conference papers, and book chapters have been published where a variant of VRP is solved using a PSO algorithm. Thus, it is significant to present a survey paper where a review and brief analysis of the most important of these papers will be given. This is the main focus of this chapter.Appearing in: Handbook of heuristic