A Modified Ant Algorithm for Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem

摘要

The ant system is a metaheuristic developed for the solution of hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, through an analysis of the constructive procedure of the solution in the Ant Colony System (ACS), a modified algorithm for solving Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), based on the ACS Hybridized with Randomized Algo-rithm(HRACS), is proposed. In HRACS, only par-tial customers are randomly chosen to compute the transition probability. Experiments on vari-ous aspects of the algorithm and computational results for fourteen benchmark problems are re-ported. We compare our approach with some other meta-heuristics and show that our results are com-petitive.