Metaheuristic Enhanced with Feature-Based Guidance and Diversity Management for Solving the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

We propose a metaheuristic algorithm enhanced with feature-based guidance that is designed to solve the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). To formulate the proposed guidance, we developed and explained a supervised Machine Learning (ML) model, that is used to formulate the guidance and control the diversity of the solution during the optimization process. We propose a metaheuristic algorithm combining neighborhood search and a novel mechanism of hybrid split and path relinking to implement the proposed guidance. The proposed guidance has proven to give a statistically significant improvement to the proposed metaheuristic algorithm when solving CVRP. Moreover, the proposed guided metaheuristic is also capable of producing competitive solutions among state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms.