Selective Discrete Symbiotic Organism Search for Capacitated Vehicle

Routing Problem
A. A. N. Perwira Redia, Parida Jewpanyab, and Vincent F. Yuc

a
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne,
Victoria 3168, Australia

b
Department of Industrial Engineering, Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Tak,
Thailand

c
Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and
Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract

This paper proposed a selective discrete symbiotic organism search (S-DSOS) heuristic
for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), which is a well-known discrete
optimization problem. SOS is a simple and powerful metaheuristic that simulates the
symbiotic interaction strategies adopted by an organism for surviving in an ecosystem. As
symbiotic organism search (SOS) is originally developed for solving continuous optimization
problems, in this study we proposed a discrete version of SOS that using a discrete solution
representation instead of converting from continuous to discrete. The interaction strategies in
SOS, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism, are modified in order to be compatible with
a discrete solution representation. The performance of S-DSOS was evaluated on a set of
benchmark instances and compared results with best known solution. The computational
results show that the proposed algorithm can produce good solution as a preliminary testing.
These results indicated that the proposed S-DSOS is competitive to solve the capacitated
vehicle routing problem.

Keywords: Symbiotic organism search; Vehicle routing problem; Discrete Solution

Representation