A Hybrid Approach Based on Ant Colony System for the VRPTW

摘要

The main objective of vehicle routing problem (VRP) is to minimize the total required fleet size for serving all customers. Secondary objectives are to minimize the total distance traveled or to minimize the total route duration of all vehicles. In this paper, we present a hybrid ant colony System, named IACS, coupled with the iterated local search (ILS) algorithm for the VRP with time windows (VRPTW). The ILS can help to escape local optimum. Experiments on various aspects of the algorithm and computational results for some benchmark problems are reported. We compare our approach with some classic, powerful meta-heuristics and show that the proposed approach can obtain the better quality of the solutions.