Title: Ant colony optimisation for location routing problem and its application to bill delivery services

Authors: M. Vamshidhar Reddy; Vinay V. Panicker; R. Sridharan

Addresses: National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kerala – 673 601, India. ' National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kerala – 673 601, India. ' National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kerala – 673 601, India

Abstract: The location-routing problem (LRP) belongs to the field of integrated logistics and is a combination of two problems, the facility-location problem and the vehicle-routing problem. Solving these two problems individually leads to a suboptimal solution. In order to solve a practical large-scale LRP, heuristic approaches become the only alternative as LRP being NP hard. In this work, an ant colony optimisation (ACO)-based heuristic is proposed to solve an LRP. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a practical case with location and routing decisions in a bill delivery services problem is solved. The performance of the ACO-based heuristic is evaluated with the heuristics available in the literature using a statistical procedure based on the hypothesis testing of difference. The results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is feasible and efficient.

Keywords: ant colony optimisation; ACO; location routing problem; LRP; integrated logistics; services; heuristics; bill delivery services; facility location; vehicle routing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2013.051018

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2013 Vol.14 No.1, pp.1 - 37

Published online: 31 May 2013 *

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