Title: Optimisation and application research of ant colony algorithm in vehicle routing problem

Authors: Lede Niu; Liran Xiong

Addresses: School of Tourism and Geographical Sciences, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China ' School of Tourism and Geographical Sciences, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China; Research Center for the Opening of Southwest China and Frontier Security, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China

Abstract: In this paper, an improved ant colony algorithm based on ant system is proposed in order to solve vehicle routing problem. When choosing the path, the 2-opt method is used to explore the reasonable selection of the parameters of the algorithm for vehicle routing problem taking the path savings among customers as heuristic information. The performance of ant colony algorithm is affected by the information heuristic factor α, expectation heuristic factor β and pheromone volatile factor ρ. The method breaks through empirically setting the ant colony algorithm parameter values. By calculation, the optimal parameters of the ant colony algorithm in solving the vehicle routing problem are: α ε [1.0, 1.7], β ε [4.5, 8.5], ρ ε [0.5, 0.6]. At last, an exploration is established to find the optimal solution by combining three parameters and the ant colony algorithm will have a better effect in the actual optimisation problem.

Keywords: ant colony algorithm; vehicle routing problem; parameter selection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSM.2021.114177

International Journal of Computing Science and Mathematics, 2021 Vol.13 No.2, pp.177 - 193

Received: 26 Sep 2018
Accepted: 16 Nov 2018
Published online: 13 Apr 2021 *

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