Abstract: “The natural honeybee’s behavior has been modelled by researchers to solve optimization problems. This paper introduces the Bee algorithm based on honeybee behavior for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The algorithm has been tested on Solomon instances. The encoding of the problem and the operations needed to implement algorithm are outlined. Experiments show that on the considered instances, using BA performs almost as well as planning for long-term, while using much less computation time. Overall, computational investigations show that the proposed algorithm is good and promising approach for the VRPTW.”

Keywords: Foraging behaviour; bee algorithm; vehicle routing problem with time windows.