Capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. Many CVRP instances cannot be solved by the exact algorithms in a reasonable time. This paper presents an adaptive genetic grey wolf optimizer algorithm (AGGWOA)

which implements grey wolf space integer coding and route-first cluster-second solution generation strategy

to solve the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The AGGWOA proposes the adaptive update strategy on moving average and grey wolf genetic operation that improve the global convergence of the algorithm. To enhance the global search ability and the local search ability of the algorithm

the AGGWOA proposes the inferior-node heuristic neighborhood search strategy

which implements the 3-opt local search operation. The experimental results indicate that the algorithm proposed has superior computational accuracy

effective optimization ability and high robustness. The effectiveness of the algorithm proposed is proved by comparing AGGWOA with 6 other algorithms including adaptive sweep plus velocity tentative PSO(Adaptive Sweep + VTPSO)

K-means clustering GWO(K-GWO)

hybrid large neighbourhood search algorithm with ant colony optimization(LNS-ACO)

elitism-based multiple colonies artificial bee colony(EBMC-ABC)

set-covering-based extended savings algorithm(SC-ESA)

hybrid variable neighborhood symbiotic organisms search(HVNSOS).