Effective Parallelization of the Vehicle Routing Problem

Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem, which is also NP-hard. A wide array of heuristics have been proposed in the literature to obtain an approximate solution to CVRP. To improve the execution time, parallel methods have been developed for accelerating metaheuristics-based algorithms, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary algorithms for CVRP. Despite these advances, our experiments with the state-of-the-art parallel solutions indicate that their run times are too high to be practically useful. The combinatorial explosion is so high that the execution time is prohibitively large even on mid-sized CVRP instances having a few hundred customers. In this work, we propose a novel technique which combines local search and randomization for solving CVRP faster with reasonable accuracy, even on large problem instances. Our usage of randomization enables searching a large space of candidate solutions. We experimentally compare our proposed method with the state-of-the-art GPU implementations on diverse input instances and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Our sequential and shared-memory parallel implementations are on an average 36-1189x faster than the state-of-the-art GPU-parallel genetic algorithms while also achieving a superior solution quality. Furthermore, our reported solutions are close to the current best-known solutions from CVRPLIB.