Addressing Vehicle Routing Problem Variants through Swarm Intelligence

Transportation features a major contribution to the country's economy. It plays a significant role in connecting business to its supply chain partners, like suppliers and customers; by moving goods from source location to the demanded location. Transportation involves almost every stage in business, like export/import of raw material; transport products to the warehouses, to the seller and to the end customer. Also, transferring people from one location to another is the largely used transportation system worldwide.

Apart from this, we all know how e-commerce market is growing day by day, because these days everyone wants the products to be delivered at their doorstep. Thanks to e-commerce and logistics-distribution, now people can order a variety of goods of national or international brands at their home without any hassle of delivery. It is the responsibility of the seller to deliver products to the customer, supporting the economic utilities of place (demand location) and time (delivery time).

Such challenges give rise to applications of vehicle routing problem, where several variants are considered in order to fulfil seller and customer requirements. They include applications such as goods and food delivery, school bus services, pick-up and drop services, and many other applications that are strictly capacity and time-restricted.