Hybrid TCNN optimization approach for the capacity vehicle routing problem

A novel approximation algorithm was proposed for the problem of finding the minimum total cost of all routes in Capacity Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). CVRP can be partitioned into three parts; the selection of vehicles among the available vehicles, the initial routing of the selected fleet and the routing optimization. Fuzzy C-means (FCM) can group the customers with close Euclidean distance into the same vehicle according to the principle of similar feature partition. Transiently chaotic neural network (TCNN) combines local search and global search, possessing high search efficiency. It will solve the routes to near optimality. A simple tabu search (TS) procedure can improve the routes to more optimality. The computations on benchmark problems and comparisons with other results in literatures show that the proposed algorithm is a viable and effective approach for CVRP.