Advanced Phasmatodea Population Evolution Algorithm for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is difficult to solve by the traditional precise methods in the transportation area. The metaheuristic algorithm is often used to solve CVRP and can obtain approximate optimal solutions. Phasmatodea population evolution algorithm (PPE) is a recently proposed metaheuristic algorithm. Given the shortcomings of PPE, such as its low convergence precision, its nature to fall into local optima easily, and it being time-consuming, we propose an advanced Phasmatodea population evolution algorithm (APPE). In APPE, we delete competition, delete conditional acceptance and correspondingevolutionary trend update, and add jump mechanism, history-based searching, and population closing moving. Deleting competition and conditional acceptance and correspondingevolutionary trend update can shorten PPE running time. Adding a jump mechanism makes PPE more likely to jump out of the local optimum. Adding history-based searching and population closing moving improves PPE’s convergence accuracy. Then, we test APPE by CEC2013. We compare the proposed APPE with differential evolution (DE), sparrow search algorithm (SSA), Harris Hawk optimization (HHO), and PPE. Experiment results show that APPE has higher convergence accuracy and shorter running time. Finally, APPE also is applied to solve CVRP. From the test results of the instances, APPE is more suitable to solve CVRP.