Confidence-Based Ant Colony Optimization for Capacitated Electric Vehicle Routing Problem With Comparison of Different Encoding Schemes

The blossoming of electric vehicles gives rise to a new vehicle routing problem (VRP) called capacitated VRP. Since charging is not as convenient refueling, both the service customers and recharging should be considered. In this article, we propose confidence-based bilevel ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm solve problem. It divides whole into upper level subproblem VRP lower fixed For subproblem, an ACO used generate customer sequence. Both direct encoding scheme order-first split-second are implemented make guideline their applicable scenes. heuristic simple enumeration proposed schedules for vehicles. Between two subproblems, selection method select promising sequence conduct local search optimization. By setting adaptive confidence thresholds, inferior sequences that have little chance become iteration best eliminated during execution. experiments show has reached state-of-the-art updated eight known solutions benchmark.