Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

This paper aims to present a brief survey on Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and its variants with different Bio-inspired metaheuristics. Metaheuristics is a high-level technique that coordinates simple heuristics and rules to find good approximate solutions and Bio-inspired metaheuristics which helps to solve challenging combinatorial optimization problems in an adaptable and distributed fashion. Vehicle routing problem is one of the Nondeterministic Polynomial - Hardcombinatorial optimization problem which aims to optimize the routes and reduce the overall cost of the routes with minimum distance. Recent years, combinatorial optimization problems are gaining more awareness of the researchers both in scientific as well as industrial world. Biologically-inspired methods are becoming more progressively important in the face of complexity in today's demanding applications. The significant attention towards VRP is due to its real-world importance and also it is very difficult to solve it and still it is foremost important problem in the area of Operations Research.
Keywords: Bio-Inspired Metaheuristics, Combinatorial Optimization, Vehicle Routing, VRP Applications, VRP Variants