254 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO.
2, MARCH 2012
Optimizing the Vehicle Routing Problem With
Time Windows: A Discrete Particle Swarm
Optimization Approach
Yue-Jiao Gong, Student Member, IEEE, Jun Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE, Ou Liu, Rui-Zhang Huang,
Henry Shu-Hung Chung, Senior Member, IEEE, and Yu-Hui Shi, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Vehicle routing problem with time windows
(VRPTW) is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization
problem that is crucial for transportation and logistics systems.
Even though the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is
originally designed to solve continuous optimization problems, in
this paper, we propose a set-based PSO to solve the discrete com-
binatorial optimization problem VRPTW (S-PSO-VRPTW). The
general method of the S-PSO-VRPTW is to select an optimal sub-
set out of the universal set by the use of the PSO framework. As
the VRPTW can be defined as selecting an optimal subgraph out
of the complete graph, the problem can be naturally solved by
the proposed algorithm. The proposed S-PSO-VRPTW treats the
discrete search space as an arc set of the complete graph that is
defined by the nodes in the VRPTW and regards the candidate
solution as a subset of arcs. Accordingly, the operators in the al-
gorithm are defined on the set instead of the arithmetic operators
in the original PSO algorithm. Besides, the process of position
updating in the algorithm is constructive, during which the con-
straints of the VRPTW are considered and a time-oriented, nearest
neighbor heuristic is used. A normalization method is introduced
to handle the primary and secondary objectives of the VRPTW.
The proposed S-PSO-VRPTW is tested on Solomon’s benchmarks.
Simulation results and comparisons illustrate the effectiveness and
efficiency of the algorithm.
Index Terms—Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs),
set-based particle swarm optimization (S-PSO), vehicle routing
problem with time windows (VRPTW).
I. INTRODUCTION
HE VEHICLE routing problem with time windows
T (VRPTW) is a crucial issue in transportation and logis-
tics systems [1], [2]. The problem can be defined as designing
Manuscript received January 19, 2010; revised November 15, 2010; accepted
March 24, 2011. Date of publication May 27, 2011; date of current version
February 17, 2012. This work was supported in part by the Project U0835002
of National Natural Science Foundation of China Joint Fund, and in part by Na-
tional Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61070004. This paper
was recommended by Associate Editor J. Lazansky.
Y.-J. Gong and J. Zhang (corresponding author) are with the Department of
Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China, the Key
Laboratory of Digital Life, (Sun Yat-sen University), Ministry of Education,
P.R. China, and the Key Laboratory of Software Technology, (Sun Yat-sen Uni-
versity), Education Department of Guangdong Province, P.R. China (e-mail:
junzhang@ieee.org).
O. Liu and R.-Z. Huang are with the School of Accounting and Finance, The
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
H. S.-H. Chung is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, City Uni-
versity of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Y.-H. Shi is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, P.R. China.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSMCC.2011.2148712
1094-6977/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
routes for a fleet of vehicles to serve a set of customers. Each
route starts from and terminates at the depot. Each customer is
visited once and only once by exactly one vehicle. The routes
should satisfy the vehicle capacity and the time window con-
straints. Besides, the VRPTW has two objectives. The primary
objective is to minimize the number of vehicle (NV) routes. The
secondary objective is to minimize the total travel distance (TD)
with the same number of routes.
In the literature, many researchers have made great effort to
solve the VRPTW and proposed both exact and approximate
approaches. Desrosiers et al. [3] developed an exact approach
by the use of column generation. Kolen et al. [4] described a
branch-and-bound method to minimize the total TD. Madsen [5]
applied the Lagrangian relaxation to compute the lower bounds.
Kohl et al. [6] introduced a Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition ap-
proach to divide paths and applied a branch-and-bound method
to minimize the distance for each path. These exact approaches
dealt with only the small-scale VRPTW (except the work in [6],
which has succeeded in to solve a few problems with up to 100
customers) because the required computational time accumu-
lates exponentially as the number of customers increases [2].
Therefore, researchers started to pay more attention to ap-
proximate approaches that are capable to find near-optimal so-
lutions within a shorter computational time. In 1995, Rochat and
Taillard [7] applied a probabilistic diversification and intensifi-
cation technique to a local search algorithm for the VRPTW.
In 1997, a tabu search heuristic was developed by Taillard
et al. [8], which further improved the best known solutions
reported in [7] and other previous works. Later, the local search
and the tabu search have been widely used to solve the VRPTW,
as in the works of Nanry and Barnes [9], Cordeau et al. [10],
Bräysy and Gendreau [11], Ho and Haugland [12], Qi et al. [13],
Shaw [14], Li et al. [15], Ibaraki et al. [16], Lee et al. [17], Bent
and Hentenryck [18], and Danna and Pape [19]. Besides, Chiang
and Russell [20] proposed simulated annealing, while Czech
and Czarnas [21] and Debudaj-Grabysz and Czech [22] ap-
plied parallel simulated annealing. The aforementioned heuris-
tic/metaheuristic approaches have succeeded in dealing with the
relatively large-scale VRPTW.
Because of the recent advancements in evolutionary compu-
tation (EC), much research effort has been paid on to develop
evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to solve the VRPTW. As a fa-
mous population-based metaheuristic algorithm, genetic algo-
rithm (GA) has been widely and successfully used [23]–[30].
Tan et al. [25], [26] authored two papers on the usage of the GA
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS
for the VRPTW. In [25], the GA incorporated an integer string
representation, several novel crossovers, and an adaptive muta-
tion scheme. In [26], the chromosomes in the GA are finetuned
by a local search approach. Results showed the effectiveness
of the hybrid GA for the VRPTW. Recently, Alvarenga [27]
combined the GA with a set partition formulation, Ghoseiri and
Ghannadpour [28] used a push-forward insertion heuristic in
the initialization of the GA, and Nazif and Lee [29] designed
a specific crossover operator that is based on graph theory for
the VRPTW. Besides the GA, other evolutionary techniques,
such as ant colony optimization (ACO), are also employed to
solve the VRPTW. Gambardella et al. [31] developed a MACS-
VRPTW algorithm in which the two objectives of the VRPTW
are optimized simultaneously by the search of two ant colonies.
Tan et al. [32] enhanced the MACS-VRPTW by the modifi-
cation of the heuristic that is used in the algorithm. Chen and
Ting [33] combined ACO with simulated annealing, and Yu et al.
[34] combined ACO with tabu search. Repoussis et al. [35] pro-
posed a novel arc-guided EA. There were also parallel struc-
tures to solve the VRPTW, such as the works by Berger and
Barkaoui [36], [37] and Bouthillier and Crainic [38]. Moreover,
some multiobjective algorithms were proposed to deal with the
problem in recent years [39], [40].
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) that was first proposed by
Kennedy and Eberhart [41] in 1995 is a relatively new technique.
In recent years, PSO has been extensively studied [42]–[46] and
widely used [47]–[51]. In PSO, each particle “flies” through
the problem space by the adjustment of its “flying” trajectory
according to its previous best performance (self-cognitive) and
the historical best performance in its neighborhood (social in-
fluence). This search mechanism enables PSO to have high op-
erating efficiency, fast convergence speed, and implementation
simplicity. These advantages of PSO and its great success to
solve various NP-hard problems encourage researchers to de-
velop PSO algorithms for the VRPTW. However, most existing
PSO algorithms are operated in continuous space, where the
trajectories of particles are defined as the changes of their phys-
ical positions. In order to apply the PSO algorithm to solve the
VRPTW, in [52]–[60], some variants of PSO algorithms have
been proposed. However, most of these approaches have simi-
larities of applying the PSO as if the particles were searching in
continuous space and, then, converted the real-value positions
into integer values to represent routes. These PSO algorithms
cannot fully embody the characteristics of the discrete prob-
lem space of the VRPTW. The operating efficiency of these
approaches is unsatisfactory. The approaches that are proposed
in [52]–[58] only solved the VRPTW with fewer than ten cus-
tomers and could not deal with the large-scale VRPTW. The
work in [59] was just a test to find out whether the swarm
moved toward the feasible region of the problem. The PSO al-
gorithm in [60] was tested on a few Solomon’s 100-customer
benchmarks, but performed unsatisfactorily in datasets R.
Recently, Chen et al. [61] proposed a new methodology of
PSO that is based on set and possibility theory. The search space
is treated as a universal set, and each candidate solution that is
represented by each particle’s position is regarded as a crisp
subset of the universal set. This novel methodology is found to
255
characterize the problem space of discrete combinatorial opti-
mization problems (COPs) very well. The VRPTW belongs to
COPs. That is, the problem space of the VRPTW is a directed
complete graph, and each candidate solution is a spanning sub-
graph of the complete graph. Thus, the VRPTW can be naturally
solved by PSO by the use of a set-based methodology. In this pa-
per, a set-based PSO to optimize the VRPTW (S-PSO-VRPTW)
is proposed. Different from previous PSO algorithms to solve
the VRPTW [52]–[60], in the S-PSO-VRPTW, operations de-
fined on set and possibilities are applied. We define a universal
set as the arc set of the complete graph in the VRPTW. Each
candidate solution is a crisp subset of the arc set. Initialized by a
nearest neighbor heuristic (NNH) with a predefined possibility
(otherwise, the particle is randomly initialized), the particle flies
through the search space by dynamically adjusting its velocity
according to historical search experience. What should be em-
phasized is that the S-PSO-VRPTW generates new positions in
a constructive way. The constraints of the VRPTW are satis-
fied during the construction. The algorithm combines the two
objectives of the VRPTW into one objective by the use of a
novel decision-making method. An arc tangent function is used
to normalize the TD within the range of [0, 1], which makes the
objective to minimize the NV in preference to the objective to
minimize the TD. This normalization method to handle the two
objectives of the VRPTW is novel, simple, and useful. It is not
only appropriate for the S-PSO-VRPTW, but also potentially
useful in other approaches to solve the VRPTW.
The main contribution of this paper is the proposed PSO,
i.e., S-PSO-VRPTW, to solve the VRPTW. Experimental re-
sults show the advantages of the proposed algorithm, which
refreshes the best known results for Solomon’s VRPTW bench-
marks [2]. More importantly, the S-PSO-VRPTW is the first
PSO algorithm that has been tested on all Solomon’s 56 bench-
marks. The promising results will encourage other researchers
to develop PSO algorithms for the VRPTW. On the other hand,
the success of our work extends the application field of the PSO
algorithm to discrete COPs.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents a formal definition of the VRPTW. Section III gives
a brief description on continuous and set-based PSO. In
Section IV, the S-PSO-VRPTW is proposed and described. Nu-
merical results are presented in Section V. Conclusion is given
in Section VI.
II. VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM
Capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), which is the
most elementary version of the VRP, can be defined as fol-
lows [31]: n customers are waiting to be served, each of which
requires a quantity qi of goods (i = 1, 2,. . ., n). A depot has a
fleet to deliver the goods. Each vehicle has a capacity of Q units,
i.e., the total demand of customers served on each route could
not exceed Q. Therefore, the vehicle has to periodically return
to the depot for reloading, which is equivalent to dispatching a
new vehicle for delivery. Besides, each customer must be vis-
ited once and only once by exactly one vehicle. A solution of
the CVRP is a collection of routes that a vehicle starts from
256 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 2, MARCH 2012

the depot, serves some specific customers, and terminates at the 

v

depot. y0k = v (7)

Define G = (V, A) as a directed complete graph, k =1

where V = (c0 , c1 , . . . ,cn ) is the node set, and A = ti + wi + si + tij = tj ∀i, j = 0, 1, . . . , n, i = j (8)
{ci , cj  |ci , cj ∈ V, ci = cj } is the arc set. c0 represents the
ej ≤ tj ≤ lj ∀j = 0, 1, . . . , n (9)
depot, and ci represents the customer i (i = 1, 2,. . ., n). Each
node is associated with a demand quantity qi , among which wi = max{ei − ti , 0} ∀i = 0, 1, . . . , n. (10)
node c0 is associated with q0 = 0. Each arc ci , cj  is associated
with a travel time tij , which is represented by the Euclidean dis- Constraint (5) denotes that the quantity of goods that each ve-
tance dij between nodes ci and cj (dij = dj i ). The objective of hicle carries could not exceed the capacity Q. Constraint (6)
the CVRP is to minimize the total travel time of all the vehicles. stands for that each customer can only be served by one vehicle.
The VRPTW is an extension of the CVRP. In the VRPTW, Constraint (7) represents that all the routes start from the depot.
nodes are associated with more properties, and the solution has Formulas (8)–(10) define the time window constraint, where ti
to satisfy more constraints. A service time si is considered; is the time when the vehicle arrives at node i; wi is the waiting
therefore, the vehicle has to stay at the location of customer ci time of a vehicle at the customer location until the time ei ; si
for a time interval at least si (s0 = 0 is associated with the depot is the service time; and tij is the travel time between nodes i
c0 ) for service. A time window [ei , li ] during which the service and j.
has to start is considered. Therefore, when a vehicle arrives at The CVRP is NP-hard [1], and in addition, the VRPTW has
customer ci earlier than ei , it has to wait until the beginning of more constraints and is, therefore, harder to solve [2]. In [62],
the time window to serve the customer. On the other hand, if a Savelsberg proved that to find a feasible solution for the VRPTW
vehicle cannot arrive at ci before li , the vehicle cannot serve ci . is NP-hard. Researches on the VRPTW have great theoretical
At this time, customer ci should be served by another vehicle. and practical values.
For depot c0 , the time window is defined as that e0 is the earliest
start time, and l0 is the latest return time of all the vehicles. III. PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION
The VRPTW has two objectives. The primary objective is to Since 1995, PSO has undergone extensive improvements
minimize the number of the vehicle routes v. The secondary and various new versions have been derived [43]–[46]. As a
objective is to minimize the total TD with the same number of population-based search algorithm, in PSO, a group of ran-
routes. domly initialized individuals explore the search space simul-
The VRPTW can be stated mathematically as follows. taneously and, finally, converge to the optimal solution of the
Define variable problem. Different from other EC techniques, PSO is inspired
 by the behavior of bird flocking (or fish schooling). Individuals
1, if vehicle k travels directly from i to j in the population that are called particles are associated with ve-
xkij =
0, otherwise locities. Particles fly through the search space by dynamically
 adjusting their velocities according to historical search experi-
1, if customer i is served by vehicle k
yik = ence. The design method and the algorithm process of PSO are
0, otherwise .
very easy to understand and simple to implement. Moreover,
The goal of the VRPTW is to minimize PSO algorithms have been found to have a global search ability,
fast convergence speed, strong robustness, etc. The algorithm is
min Z1 = v (1) a very powerful optimization technique. In recent years, PSO
and algorithms have been widely used in a great many applications
[49]–[52].

n 
n 
v
min Z2 = tij × xkij (2)
i=0 j =0 k =1 A. Particle Swarm Optimization in Continuous Space
s.t. The original PSO is used for continuous optimizations. It

n proceeds as follows. Each particle i in the population consists
xkij = yjk ∀k = 1, . . . , v, ∀j = 1, . . . , n (3) of three D-dimensional vectors including the velocity vector,
i=0 i.e., Vi = [Vi1 , Vi2 , . . . , ViD ], the current position vector, i.e.,

n Xi = [Xi1 , Xi2 , . . . , XiD ], and the previous best position vector,
xkij = yik ∀k = 1, . . . , v, ∀i = 1, . . . , n (4) i.e., pBesti = [pBest1i , pBest2i , . . . , pBestD i ], where D is the
j =0 dimensionality of the search space. Moreover, the whole pop-
ulation maintains a global best-so-far position vector gBest =

n
yik × qi ≤ Q ∀k = 1, . . . , v (5) [gBest1 , gBest2 , . . . , gBestD ]. An overall flowchart of PSO is
i=0 shown in Fig. 1. In each iteration of the evolutionary process,
particle i learns from its own search experience pBesti and

v
yik = 1 ∀i = 1, . . . , n (6) the swarm’s search experience gBest to update its velocity Vi
k =1 and position Xi . The update rules of a particle’s velocity and
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS
Fig. 1. Flowchart of PSO algorithms.
position are very simple, which are defined as
Vid = ω × Vid + c1 × randd1 × (pBestdi − Xid ) + c2 × randd2
× (gBestd − Xid ) (11)
Xid = Xid + Vid (12)
where ω is the inertia weight; c1 and c2 are the acceleration
coefficients that determine the relative weight of self-cognitive
and social influence; randd1 and randd2 are two random numbers
that are uniformly distributed over [0, 1]; i represents the current
particle; and d represents the current dimension.
Liang et al. [45] proposed a representative PSO variant that is
called comprehensive learning PSO (CLPSO). The CLPSO uses
a novel velocity update rule to prevent premature convergence
as
 
Vid = ω × Vid + c × randd × pBestdfi (d) − Xid (13)
where fi (d) ∈ {1, 2, . . . , M } (M is the population size) defines
that the dth dimension of which particle’s pBest particle i should
follow. The decision of fi (d) depends on a probability Pc. That
is, for each dimension of particle i, a random number “rand” in
a range [0, 1] is generated. If rand is larger than Pc, the corre-
sponding dimension of particle i will learn from its own pBest,
i.e., fi (d) = i. Otherwise, particle i will employ a tournament
selection to choose another particle’s pBest to learn from. Exper-
imental results in [45] demonstrated that CLPSO performs very
well when solving complex multimodal optimization problems.
257
B. Set-Based Particle Swarm Optimization
Original PSO algorithms are commonly used to solve contin-
uous optimization problems, whereas S-PSO [61] is proposed
to solve discrete COPs. COPs can be defined as (S, f, Ω), where
S is the set of candidate solutions that is called the problem
space, f is the objective function that calculates the cost value
for each candidate solution, and Ω is the set of constraints. A
set-based representation method is proposed in S-PSO to char-
acterize the discrete search space of COPs [61]. The search
space is represented by a universal set S. The elements in S can
be divided into D dimensions. Each dimension stands for a sub-
set Si (i = 1, . . . ,D) of S, i.e., S = S 1 ∪ S 2 ∪ · · · ∪ S D . Each
candidate solution X is a subset of S, which satisfies X ⊆ S
via X = X 1 ∪ X 2 ∪ · · · ∪ X D , X i ⊆ S i (i = 1, . . . , D). X is
considered to be a feasible solution if and only if it satisfies all
the constraints in Ω. The objective of S-PSO is to find a feasible
solution X∗ (to choose a subset out of S) that minimizes the cost
function f.
The framework of S-PSO is identical with original PSO al-
gorithms, which is shown in Fig. 1. The velocity and position
update rules in S-PSO also have the same format as that in origi-
nal PSO algorithms that are shown in formulas (11) and (12) (or
formulas (13) and (12) if it employs the comprehensive learn-
ing strategy of CLPSO), respectively. However, the particle’s
position in S-PSO is represented by a crisp subset, i.e., X ⊆ S,
instead of the numerical digits in original PSO algorithms, and
the velocity is represented by a set with possibilities. There-
fore, the operators in formulas (11) and (12) are defined on set
and possibilities instead of the arithmetic operators in original
PSO algorithms. The definitions of these operators when us-
ing S-PSO to solve the VRPTW will be described in the next
section.
IV. SET-BASED PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION FOR VEHICLE
ROUTING PROBLEMS WITH TIME WINDOWS
In this section, the S-PSO-VRPTW is proposed and described.
As we know, the problem space of the VRPTW is a directed
complete graph, i.e., G = (V, A), and each candidate solution is
a spanning subgraph of G. The candidate solutions are judged
to be feasible solutions if they satisfy the constraints that are
defined by formulas (3)–(10). The goal of the VRPTW is to
find a feasible solution that minimizes the NV and the total TD.
Because of these features of the VRPTW, the problem can be
naturally solved by S-PSO (as described in Section III that the
basic methodology of S-PSO is to select an optimal subset out
of the universal set).
In the S-PSO-VRPTW, the search space of the particle swarm
is the arc set A of the complete graph G. Each particle’s position
is represented by a crisp set of arcs, which is a subset of A,
to denote a feasible solution of the problem. The velocity is
represented by a set of arcs with possibilities. The arcs may
be selected to construct the new position of the particle, while
an arc associated with a larger possibility is more likely to be
selected in the construction. As the position and velocity in the
S-PSO-VRPTW are represented as arc sets and possibilities, the
corresponding velocity and position update rules are defined as
258 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 2, MARCH 2012
Fig. 2. Illustrations of the constraints-based decoder in the S-PSO-VRPTW.
(a) Decode an edge. (b) Decode a solution.
operators and procedures that are based on these arc sets and
possibilities.
A. Particle Representation
1) Position: In the S-PSO-VRPTW, the position of a particle
is represented by
Xi = [Xi0 , Xi1 , . . . , Xin ]
Xid = [nb1 , d, d, nb2 ], nb1 , nb2 ∈ {0, 1, . . . , d − 1, d + 1, n},
nb1 = nb2
where Xi is an arc set with each dimension Xid that is composed
of two arcs adjacent to node d. In (15), n is the number of nodes;
d is the index of current dimension; nb1 is the previous node of
node d, and nb2 is the subsequent node of node d. The position
of each particle represents a directed Hamilton circle in the
complete graph.
The Hamilton circle can be converted into a collection of ve-
hicle routes, which stands for a feasible solution of the problem
by the use of a constraint-based decoder. The illustration of the
constraint-based decoder is shown in Fig. 2. Starting from the
outarc of the depot, for each arc in the Hamilton circle, if the
arc satisfies all the constraints in the VRPTW, it would be pre-
served; otherwise, the depot would be inserted between the two
nodes, and the arc is replaced by two new arcs. This process
is equivalent to sending a vehicle to deliver the goods along
the Hamilton circle at the beginning, and when the vehicle is
unable to serve the next customer on the circle because of the
capacity or the time window constraints, one more new vehicle
route is created. By the definitions of the particle position and
the constraint-based decoder, each particle represents a feasible
solution of the VRPTW in the S-PSO-VRPTW.
2) Velocity: The velocity of a particle is defined as
Vi = [Vi0 , Vi1 , . . . , Vin ] (16)
Vid = {u, v/p(u, v)|u, v ∈ A } d
(17)
where Ad is the set of arcs that are adjacent to node d in the com-
plete graph, and p(u, v) ∈ [0, 1] is the corresponding possibility
of each arc u, v. p(u, v) denotes the possibility of u, v to be
selected when updating the position of a particle, which will be
illustrated later. If p(u, v) = 0, arc u, v is omitted in Vid .
B. Velocity Updating
As the problem space of the VRPTW is always unknown
and complex, the S-PSO-VRPTW employs the comprehensive
learning strategy of CLPSO to prevent premature convergence,
i.e., the velocity updating is according to formula (13). However,
the S-PSO-VRPTW employs novel operators that are defined on
set and possibilities instead of the arithmetic operators in orig-
inal PSO algorithms. Inspired by the work in [61], the defini-
tions of these operators are shown in (18)–(21), respectively.
The coefficient×velocity operator and the velocity+velocity
operator are defined as changing the value of p(u, v), the
position−position operator is defined as the subtraction of the
two arc sets, and the coefficient×(position−position) operator
is defined as converting a crisp set into a set with possibilities:

c × Vid = {u, v/p (u, v) u, v ∈ Ad },

1, if c × p(u, v) > 1
p (u, v) = (18)
c × p(u, v), otherwise

Vid + Vjd = {u, v/ max(pi (u, v), pj (u, v)) u, v ∈ Ad }
(14)
(19)

Xid − Xjd d 
= U = {u, v u, v ∈ Xi and u, v ∈
d
/ Xj }
d
(15)
(20)

c × U d = {u, v/p (u, v) u, v ∈ Ad },
⎧
⎨ 1, if u, v ∈ U d and c > 1
p (u, v) = c, if u, v ∈ U d and 0 ≤ c ≤ 1 (21)
⎩
0, if u, v ∈ / Ud.
For example, suppose that Vi1 = {1, 3/0.5, 1, 4/0.2,
4, 1/0.3}, Xi1 = {5, 1, 1, 3}, pBest1f i (1) = {4, 1,
1, 3}, ω = 0.7, c = 2.0, rand1 = 0.3. Then, we have ω ×
Vi1 = {1, 3/0.35, 1, 4/0.14, 4, 1/0.21}, pBest1f i (1) −
Xi1 = {4, 1}, and c × rand1 × (pBest1f i (1) −Xi1 ) = {4, 1/
0.6}. Finally, it can be deduced that the new velocity Vi1 = ω ×
Vi1 + c × rand1 × (pBest1f i (1) − Xi1 ) = {1, 3/0.35, 1, 4
/0.14, 4, 1/0.6}.
By learning from pBest1f i (1) , the corresponding possibility of
arc 4, 1 in the velocity set is improved. The example clearly
shows that the significance of updating of the arcs with possibil-
ities in the velocity set of the S-PSO-VRPTW is identical with
the significance of the velocity updating in original PSO algo-
rithms, i.e., adjusting the velocity by learning from the historical
best information.
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS 259

C. Position Updating
The position of particle i is updated by (12), where the opera-
tor “+” is also redefined in the S-PSO-VRPTW. In the position
updating process, we first convert the velocity Vi into a crisp set
by

Cut(Vid ) = {u, v u, v/p(u, v) ∈ Vid and p(u, v) ≥ rand}
(22)
where rand ∈ [0, 1] is a random number. For an arc u, v, it is
kept in the velocity set if and only if its corresponding possibility
p(u, v) is not smaller than rand. This way, the arc with a larger
p(u, v) is more likely to be preserved in the crisp set after the
conversion.
Then, the new position (Xi ) is built in a constructive way,
during which the capacity and time window constraints are
taken into account. (Xi ) is set as an empty set at first. In
accordance with that each vehicle starts from the depot, the
construction starts at (Xi0 ) of (Xi ) , selects an arc adjacent
to node 0, and chooses the next customer iteratively. Sup-
pose the current customer that the vehicle is serving is k,
the next customer m that the vehicle will visit comes from
three crisp sets: the SV = {m |k, m ∈ Vi , k, m satisfies Ω},
SX = {m |k, m ∈ Xi , k, m satisfies Ω}, and SA =
{m |k, m ∈ A , k, m satisfies Ω}. If there are nodes avail-
able in SV , m is selected from SV . Otherwise, if there are nodes
available in SX , m is selected from SX . Otherwise, m is selected
from SA . After selecting m, arc k, m is added to (Xi ) . When
there is no available node in all the SV , SX , and SA , the con-
straints of the VRPTW cannot be satisfied unless a new route Fig. 3. Pseudocode for the position update procedure in the S-PSO-VRPTW.
is created. At this point, we suppose a depot node is inserted
after k and, then, reselect m. This way, the feasibility of (Xi ) is
guaranteed. After constructing (Xi ) , the current position Xi of
this possibility, the particle is initialized by the NNH using the
particle i is replaced by (Xi ) . The pseudocode of the position
heuristic defined by (23). Otherwise, the particle is randomly
update rule is shown in Fig. 3.
initialized.
Moreover, we employ a time-oriented NNH to select better
elements. In other words, the selection of m in the position
updating is heuristic based. In every available set of nodes, the D. Objective Function
customer that is “closest” to the current customer k will be
selected. We use a matrix to record the heuristic information It has been noted in Section II that the VRPTW has two
between every two nodes, in which the closeness is defined objectives. The S-PSO-VRPTW incorporates a novel decision
according to making method to deal with the primary and secondary objec-
tives of the VRPTW. It is easy to implement and is demon-
heuristick m = bk m + rk m = (tk m + wm ) + (lm − tm ) strated to be very effective by the experimental results in
(23) Section V. The fitness of each particle depends both on the NV
where the definitions of tk m , wm , lm , and tm have been given in and the total TD. Notice that the NV, i.e., the primary objective
Section II; bk m = tk m + wm represents the time span between of the VRPTW, is an integer number, which indicates that every
the time when the vehicle completes the service for customer k two candidate solutions with different NV are certain to satisfy
and the time when the vehicle begin to serve customer m; rk m = |NV(Xi ) − NV(Xj )| ≥ 1. Therefore, if we normalize the TD
lm − tm defines the remaining time of customer m allowed to be within the range of [0, 1], the objective to minimize the NV is
served. in preference to the objective to minimize the TD. The objec-
At the beginning of the S-PSO-VRPTW, the position of each tive function of the S-PSO-VRPTW is defined by (25) and (26).
particle is initialized by Here, an arc tangent function is introduced for normalization,
 and the graph of which is shown in Fig. 4:
NNH(), if rand < ϕ
Xi = (24)
Random(), otherwise
fitness (Xi ) = NV(Xi ) + normalize (TD(Xi )) (25)
where “rand” is a random number that is uniformly distributed
over [0, 1], and ϕ is the possibility of greedy initialization. Under normalize (x) = arctan(x)/(π/2). (26)
260 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 2, MARCH 2012
Fig. 4. Arc tangent function for normalization.
Fig. 5. Illustrations of the local search operator. (a) Before local search.
(b) After local search.
E. Additional Local Search
After each particle finishes updating its position, a simple lo-
cal search scheme is applied. The scheme has potential to further
reduce the required NV, which can accelerate the convergence
of the particle swarm. The procedure of the local search for
particle i in the S-PSO-VRPTW is described as follows.
Step 1: Choose the route r that has the fewest customers.
Step 2: For each customer in r, try to insert it into the other
vehicle routes on the premise such that the insertion
does not change the start and the end time of the ser-
vice for all the customers in which the route is being
inserted and satisfies the constraints of the VRPTW.
Step 3: If all the customers in r can be inserted into other
routes, route r is deleted, and the position of particle i
is updated. Otherwise, the position of particle i stays
the same.
As Fig. 5 shows, route 3 has the fewest customers; thus, the
local search intends to insert the three customers of route 3 into
route 1 and 2. If the insertions succeed, route 3 is deleted, and
the position of the particle is updated. Otherwise, the position
is kept as that before the local search.
V. NUMERICAL RESULTS
This section presents the numerical experimental results for
the S-PSO-VRPTW. The experiments are done on Solomon’s
benchmarks that consist of six different datasets [2]. Datasets
C have clustered customers, and the time windows are gener-
ated by the known vehicle routes for these clustered customers.
Datasets R have randomly generated customers that are dis-
tributed uniformly over a square. Datasets RC have mixed cus-
tomers of datasets C and R. Datasets C1, R1, and RC1 have
narrow time windows and small delivery capacity, which allow
few customers to be served by one vehicle. In contrast, datasets
C2, R2, and RC2 have large time windows and capacity, which
allow more customers to be served by one vehicle.
A. Experimental Settings
As mentioned earlier, the S-PSO-VRPTW employs the
CLPSO framework. In the experiments, the inertia weight ω
in (13) is initialized as 0.9 and linearly decreased from 0.9 to
0.4 during the training process, and the acceleration coefficient
c is set as 2.0. Besides, the refreshing gap “rg” and learning
probability Pc of CLPSO are set according to what reported
in the paper which proposed CLPSO [45]; the population size
is set as M = 20; and the possibility of greedy initialization is
set as ϕ = 0.3. We employ a flexible terminal condition that
if the gBest vector ceases the improvement for a certain num-
ber of generations (called stopping gap “sg”), the algorithm is
terminated. Solomon’s 25-customer/50-customer/100-customer
benchmarks are tested in this paper. For the 25-customer bench-
marks, sg is set as 1000, whereas for the 50-customer and 100-
customer benchmarks, sg is set as 10 000. Our algorithm is
coded in C and runs on a machine with Intel Pentium 4 CPU,
2.79 GHz/512 MB of RAM. Each test is conducted 30 times
independently.
In the remaining of this section, the experimental results are
presented. The results obtained by the S-PSO-VRPTW are com-
pared with the best-so-far results that are reported at Solomon’s
web page: http://web.cba.neu.edu/∼msolomon/problems.htm.
These best known results are derived from 23 different algo-
rithms that include exact, heuristic, and metaheuristic algo-
rithms. The algorithms consist of KDMSS [6], RT [7], TBGGP
[8], CLM [10], S97 [14], LLH [15], IKMUY [16], BVH [18],
DLP [19], CC [21], GTA [31], BB [37], S98 [63], CR [64],
L [65], HG [66], SSSD [67], H [68], KLM [69], RGP [70],
M [71], IV [72], and C [73].
In addition, we have also implemented a previous PSO
algorithm for the VRPTW termed I-PSO [53]. In this paper, the
I-PSO algorithm is tested on Solomon’s 25-customer instances,
with parameter settings and stopping criterion the same as in the
S-PSO-VRPTW. Furthermore, the proposed S-PSO-VRPTW
is compared with some other state-of-the-art population-based
techniques that include the GAs that are proposed by Tan et al.
(HGA) [26] and Nazif and Lee (OCGA) [29], and a hybrid
algorithm combining ACO with tabu search (ACO-TS) [34].
The detailed results of the three algorithms to optimize
Solomon’s 100-customer instances are reported in [26], [29],
and [34], respectively.
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS 261

TABLE I
RESULT COMPARISONS FOR SOLOMON’S 25-CUSTOMER INSTANCES

B. Results and Comparisons
Tables I–III show the result comparisons, in which “NV”
represents the NV routes and “TD” represents the total TD.
“Authors” denotes who have proposed the best results. “CPU”
stands for the computational time (in minutes). The best and
mean results are presented. A problem marked with (∗∗) and
the best result in bold indicate that, for the instance, the S-PSO-
VRPTW provides new best result. In other cases, if the NV
routes that we obtained is equal to that of the best known, which
means that the S-PSO-VRPTW produces the best or near-best
result, the problem is marked with (∗), and the best result is
presented in italic.
1) 25-Customer Instances: As shown in Table I, for 25-
customer instances, the S-PSO-VRPTW produces 29 out of
56 new best results, among which four come from the R1-
type datasets, ten come from the R2-type datasets, seven come
from the C2-type datasets, and eight come from the RC2-type
262 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 2, MARCH 2012
TABLE II
RESULT COMPARISONS FOR SOLOMON’S 50-CUSTOMER INSTANCES
datasets. Compared with the previous algorithms that provided
the best known, the S-PSO-VRPTW has better performance in
exploring irregular search space (datasets R and RC). Moreover,
the proposed algorithm is very good at reducing the required
NV. For the instances with large time windows and capacities,
the required NV is very small. Particularly, in some cases, all
the customers can be served by only one vehicle. Besides the 29
new best known, the S-PSO-VRPTW obtains another 26 solu-
tions that are equal or close to the current best known solutions.
Therefore, the proposed algorithm performs well in optimizing
55 out of the 56 25-customer instances.
In Table I, it can be observed that the S-PSO-VRPTW com-
prehensively outperforms I-PSO. However, the computational
time of I-PSO is less than that of the proposed S-PSO-VRPTW.
TABLE III
RESULT COMPARISONS FOR SOLOMON’S 100-CUSTOMER INSTANCES
In order to make further comparisons, we modify the stopping
criterion of I-PSO as that when its running time reaches the
computational time of the S-PSO-VRPTW for each instance, it
will be terminated. This way, results that are obtained by the
I-PSO and the S-PSO-VRPTW by the use of the same computa-
tional time are compared. However, we find that the new results
of I-PSO are almost the same as those reported in Table I. It
means that I-PSO converges fast to the local optimum and stops
evolving in an early generation. When using the flexible stop-
ping criterion as described earlier, the required computational
time of I-PSO is, thus, less than that of the S-PSO-VRPTW.
The comparisons in Table I and the aforementioned investi-
gation show that the proposed S-PSO-VRPTW presents a much
better performance than I-PSO. This is because the I-PSO that
uses the methodology of original continuous PSO is not well fit
for the discrete VRPTW, whereas by the use of the methodology
of S-PSO, the S-PSO-VRPTW is a natural technique to solve
the VRPTW.
2) 50-Customer Instances: As shown in Table II, for 50-
customer instances, the S-PSO-VRPTW produces 32 out of 56
new best results, among which seven come from the R1-type
datasets, 11 come from the R2-type datasets, six come from the
C2-type datasets, and eight come from the RC2-type datasets. It
can be observed that the algorithm is very good at dealing with
instances with large time windows and vehicle capacities. For
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS
Fig. 6. Schematic illustrations of the search process for R101, R201, and C101.
datasets R2 and RC2, the S-PSO-VRPTW refreshes all the best
known results that are published so far, while for datasets C2,
the S-PSO-VRPTW obtains six out of eight new best results.
Besides, for 23 of the remaining 24 instances, the S-PSO-
VRPTW produces best or near-best results compared with the
algorithms in the literature. Therefore, the S-PSO-VRPTW is a
very powerful technique to solve almost all the Solomon’s 50-
customer instances. The only expectance is that, for instance,
R106, the S-PSO-VRPTW requires a larger NV than KMDSS
[6].
3) 100-Customer Instances: In Table III, results of the
S-PSO-VRPTW that optimizes Solomon’s 100-customer in-
stances are presented. Compared with the best known results
that are summarized on Solomon’s website, which is gained
by 23 different algorithms, the S-PSO-VRPTW obtains 39
best or near-best solutions, among which four come from R1-
type datasets, nine come from R2-type datasets, eight come
from C1-type datasets, eight come from C2-type datasets, three
come from RC1-type datasets, and seven come from RC2-type
datasets. Although no new best results are reported, the per-
formance of the S-PSO-VRPTW for 100-customer instances is
263
still competitive, especially, to deal with datasets with large time
windows including R2, C2, and RC2.
Furthermore, the S-PSO-VRPTW is compared with HGA
[26], OCGA [29], and ACO-TS [34]. In Table III, it can be
observed that the S-PSO-VRPTW provides results with fewer
NV than HGA, OCGA, and ACO-TS for 31, 33, and 24 in-
stances, respectively. Only when optimizing R103 and RC108
out of the 56 instances, HGA can achieve fewer NV than the
S-PSO-VRPTW. None of the NV that are produced by OCGA
is fewer than those obtained by the S-PSO-VRPTW. ACO-TS
provides fewer NV than the S-PSO-VRPTW only to solve R108
and RC101. Moreover, taking the TD into consideration, we can
find that the S-PSO-VRPTW obtains the shorter TD than HGA,
OCGA, and ACO-TS in optimizing a lot of instances, such as
R101, R103, etc. These comparisons show the effectiveness and
competitiveness of the usage of the S-PSO-VRPTW to solve
the VRPTW, for the proposed algorithm is good at reducing the
required NV routes as well as the total TD.
We investigate the convergence behavior of the S-PSO-
VRPTW. Figs. 6 and 7 show the convergence curves of the
best runs to optimize R101, R201, C101, C201, RC101, and
264 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 2, MARCH 2012
Fig. 7. Schematic illustrations of the search process for C201, RC101, and RC201.
RC201, respectively. It can be observed that the NV decreases
as the iteration increases. The TD oscillates somewhat, but it
decreases within the same NV. The fitness primarily depends on
the vehicle number and, then, depends on the TD, and decreases
as the iteration increases. The convergence behavior of the S-
PSO-VRPTW indicates the usefulness of our decision making
method for the two objectives of the VRPTW.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a set-based PSO to solve the
VRPTW. In the S-PSO-VRPTW, the search space is a universal
set of arcs in the complete graph of the VRPTW. Each particle’s
position that represents a set of delivery routes for a fleet of
vehicles has been defined as a subset of arcs and built construc-
tively. In this representation, the characteristics of the VRPTW
have been fully embodied. During the construction of particle’s
position, the constraints of the VRPTW have been taken into ac-
count, and a time-oriented NNH has bee applied. Furthermore,
a novel decision making method has been proposed to han-
dle the primary and secondary objectives of the VRPTW. This
method is not only appropriate for the S-PSO-VRPTW, but also
potentially useful in other approaches to solve the VRPTW.
The proposed S-PSO-VRPTW was the first PSO algorithm
that was tested on all Solomon’s benchmarks. Experimental re-
sults illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed
algorithm, for we provide better results than the existing best
known results for Solomon’s instances. Moreover, the S-PSO-
VRPTW obtains promising results on almost all the tested in-
stances, which shows the robustness of the algorithm. Compared
with another PSO algorithm, two GAs, and a hybrid ACO algo-
rithm, the S-PSO-VRPTW has been further demonstrated to be
competitive to solve the VRPTW.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Editor-in Chief, Asso-
ciate Editor, and Reviewers for their valuable comments and
suggestions that improved the quality of the paper.
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS
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Yue-Jiao Gong (S’10) received the B.S. degree
in computer science from Sun Yat-Sen University,
Guangzhou, China, in 2010, where she is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree.
Her current research interests include artificial in-
telligence, evolutionary computation, swarm intelli-
gence, and their applications in design and optimiza-
tion of intelligent transportation systems.
Jun Zhang (M’02–SM’08) received the Ph.D. degree
in electrical engineering from the City University of
Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, in 2002.
He was a Brain Korean 21 Postdoctoral Fellow
with the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Sci-
ence and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, from 2003
to 2004. Since 2004, he has been with Sun Yat-Sen
University, Guangzhon, China, where he is currently
a Professor and the Ph.D. Supervisor with the Depart-
ment of Computer Science. He is the author of seven
research books and book chapters, and more than 80 technical papers in his
research areas. His research interests include computational intelligence, data
mining, wireless sensor networks, operations research, and power electronic
circuits.
Dr. Zhang is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUS-
TRIAL ELECTRONICS. He is also the Chair of the IEEE Beijing (Guangzhou)
Section Computational Intelligence Society Chapter and the Chair of the IEEE
Guangzhou Subsection.
Ou Liu received the Ph.D. degree in information
systems from the City University of Hong Kong,
Kowloon, Hong Kong, in 2006.
He has been with The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, since 2006, where
he is currently an Assistant Professor with the School
of Accounting and Finance. His current research in-
terests include business intelligence, decision support
systems, ontology engineering, genetic algorithms,
ant colony systems, fuzzy logic, and neural networks.
Rui-Zhang Huang received the M.Phil. and Ph.D.
degrees from the Department of Systems Engineering
and Engineering Management, Chinese University of
Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, in 2003 and 2008,
respectively.
She has been with The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, since 2007. She is
the author or coauthor of several papers of some pres-
tigious journals and conferences. She was involved in
many research works in various fields, such as min-
ing unseen named entity translations, semisupervised
document clustering, hierarchical incremental document clustering, active learn-
ing for clustering, language modeling, etc. Her current research interests include
data mining, text mining, machine learning, information retrieval, artificial in-
telligence, and knowledge systems.
GONG et al.: OPTIMIZING THE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH TIME WINDOWS
Henry Shu-Hung Chung (M’95–SM’03) received
the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineer-
ing from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Kowloon, Hong Kong, in 1991 and 1994, respec-
tively.
He has been with the City University of Hong
Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, since 1995, where he
is currently an Associate Dean with the College of
Science and Engineering and a Professor with the
Department of Electronic Engineering. He is the au-
thor of seven research book chapters and more than
280 technical papers including 130 refereed journal papers in his research ar-
eas and holds 16 patents. His research interests include time- and frequency-
domain analysis of power electronic circuits, switched-capacitor-based convert-
ers, random-switching techniques, control methods, digital audio amplifiers,
soft-switching converters, electronic ballast design, and circuit design with evo-
lutionary computation techniques.
Dr. Chung is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
POWER ELECTRONICS and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND
SYSTEMS—PART II.
267
Yu-Hui Shi (SM’98) received the Ph.D. degree in
electronic engineering from South-East University,
Nanjing, China, in 1992.
He is currently a Professor with the Depart-
ment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Xi’an
Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China, where
he is also the Director of the Research and Postgrad-
uate Office. Before joining Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool
University, he was with Electronic Data Systems Cor-
poration, Indianapolis, IN. His main research inter-
ests include the areas of computational intelligence
techniques (including swarm intelligence) and their applications.
Dr. Shi is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Swarm In-
telligence Research and an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION. He is the Chair of the IEEE Chief Information
Officer Task Force on Swarm Intelligence.