A Two-Pheromone Trail Ant Colony System Approach for the Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Multiple Products and Product Incompatibility

摘要

We consider a variant of the vehicle routing problem subject to time windows for every customer, multiple products and incompatibility between them, using a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. Since the problem is NP-hard, the approach to achieve feasible solutions is an ant colony system with two-pheromone to minimize routing cost and vehicle fleet size. Experiments conducted using instances from the literature show that the proposed approach provides competitive solutions in relatively short computational times.