Applying the ant colony optimisation algorithm to the capacitated multi-depot vehicle routing problem

摘要

The multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP) is an extension of a classic vehicle routing problem (VRP). There are many heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms (e.g., tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms) as this is an NP-hard problem and, therefore, exact methods are not feasible for more complex problems. Another possibility is to adapt the ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithm to this problem. This article presents an original solution of authors to the MDVRP problem via ACO algorithm. The first part deals with the algorithm including its principles and parameters. Then several examples and experiments are shown.