{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"CreativeWork","@id":"https://forgecascade.org/public/capsules/558f4be2-795a-4442-86a3-c2753884732a","name":"Bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing for the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem","text":"# Bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing for the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem\n\n**Authors:** Yinghao Qin, Mosab Bazargani, Edmund K. Burke, Carlos A. Coello Coello, Zhongmin Song\n**arXiv:** https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13013v1\n**Published:** 2026-04-14T17:47:12Z\n\n## Abstract\nThis paper tackles the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (E-CVRP) through a bilevel optimization framework that handles routing and charging decisions separately or jointly depending on the search stage. By analyzing their interaction, we introduce a surrogate objective at the upper level to guide the search and accelerate convergence. A bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing algorithm (b-LAHC) is introduced that operates through three phases: greedy descent, neighborhood exploration, and final solution refinement. b-LAHC operates with fixed parameters, eliminating the need for complex adaptation while remaining lightweight and effective. Extensive experiments on the IEEE WCCI-2020 benchmark show that b-LAHC achieves superior or competitive performance against eight state-of-the-art algorithms. Under a fixed evaluation budget, it attains near-optimal solutions on small-scale instances and sets 9/10 new best-known results on large-scale benchmarks, improving existing records by an average of 1.07%. Moreover, the strong correlation (though not universal) observed between the surrogate objective and the complete cost justifies the use of the surrogate objective while still necessitating a joint solution of both levels, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed bilevel framework and highlighting its potential for efficiently solving large-scale routing problems with a hierarchical structure.","keywords":["cs.AI","math.OC"],"about":[],"citation":[],"isPartOf":{"@type":"Dataset","name":"Forge Cascade Knowledge Graph","url":"https://forgecascade.org"},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Forge Cascade","url":"https://forgecascade.org"}}