The Bees Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

In this thesis we present a new algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem called the Enhanced Bees Algorithm. It is adapted from a fairly recent algorithm, the Bees Algorithm, which was developed for continuous optimisation problems. We show that the results obtained by the Enhanced Bees Algorithm are competitive with the best meta-heuristics available for the Vehicle Routing Problem—it is able to achieve results that are within 0.5% of the optimal solution on a commonly used set of test instances. We show that the algorithm has good runtime performance, producing results within 2% of the optimal solution within 60 seconds, making it suitable for use within real world dispatch scenarios. Additionally, we provide a short history of well known results from the literature along with a detailed description of the foundational methods developed to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem.