Title: Vehicle routing optimisation algorithm for agricultural products logistics distribution

Authors: Mingqi Sun; Dezhi Pang

Addresses: Harbin University of Science and Technology Rongcheng Campus, Shandong Rongcheng, 264300, China ' Harbin University of Science and Technology Rongcheng Campus, Shandong Rongcheng, 264300, China

Abstract: This paper aims to handle the problem of vehicle routing optimisation in agricultural products logistics distribution. The vehicle routing optimisation problem is converted to a graph model calculation problem and then the node set of the graph contain depots and customers. The vehicle routing optimisation is to seek an optimal one from all possible paths which consumes least fuels. The main innovation of this paper is to introduce the ant colony algorithm in the vehicle route optimisation problem. In vehicle routing, each ant starts from the depot and goes through several customers and then goes back to the starting point. Furthermore, customers are determined with the pheromone information and multiple pheromone information matrixes are built up. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly reduce fuel cost in agricultural products logistics distribution.

Keywords: vehicle routing optimisation; agricultural products; logistics distribution; ant colony algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2017.087175

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2017 Vol.10 No.4, pp.327 - 334

Received: 13 Dec 2016
Accepted: 05 Mar 2017
Published online: 06 Oct 2017 *

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