An ant colony algorithm for solving fixed destination multi-depot multiple traveling salesmen problems

摘要

The fixed destination multi-depot multiple traveling salesmen problem (MmTSP) is a problem, in which more than one salesmen depart from several starting cities and having returned to the starting city, form tours so that each city is visited with exactly one salesman, and the tour lengths stay within certain limits. This problem is of a great complexity and few investigations have been done on it previously. In this paper an ant system is designed to solve the problem and the results are compared to the answers obtained by solving the same problems by Lingo 8.0 which uses exact methods.