VRP in real life has widely applications and has been
proved to be an NP-complete problem. Because PSO has the
advantage of fast convergence, easy to calculate and good
robustness, consequently, many researchers applied PSO to
VRP and proposed a number of improved methods based on
it. In this paper we have given a very comprehensive review
of the most important Vehicle Routing Problem techniques
developed for PSO. This paper provides a comprehensive
survey of solving VRP by PSO from two basic aspects: the
improved PSO algorithms and the particle encoding methods.
Each group of approaches is detailed described. However,
there is still plenty of room for new techniques and more
research in this area. For example, further research to design
the general particle encoding schemes method in order to
solving variants of VRP should be carried out. Since the
variants of VRP differ from one another only on the specific
problem constraints, the adjustment is only required in the
constraint feasibility checking of the decoding method.
However, the effectiveness of this idea needs further
exploration.