Title: Ant_VRP: ant-colony-based meta-heuristic algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem

Authors: Majid Nikougoftar Nategh; Ali Asghar Rahmani Hosseinabadi; Valentina Emilia Balas

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, University of Qom, Qom Beranch, Qom, Iran ' Young Researchers and Elite Club, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Islamic Azad University, Amol, Iran ' Aurel Vlaicu' University, Bd. Revolutiei 77, 310130, Arad, Romania

Abstract: Vehicle routing problem is one of the most important combinatorial optimisation problems and is very important for researchers and scientists today. In this kind of problems, the aim is to determine the minimum cost needed to move the vehicles, which start simultaneously from the warehouse and returned to it after visiting customers. There are two constraints for costumers and vehicles, first, each node must be visited by only one vehicle and second, each vehicle must not load more than its capacity. In this paper, a combination of ant colony algorithm and mutation operation named Ant_VRP is proposed to solve the vehicle routing problem. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated by comparing with other heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; optimisation; ant colony algorithm; ACO; mutation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2018.095470

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2018 Vol.11 No.3/4, pp.315 - 334

Received: 26 Feb 2016
Accepted: 20 Mar 2016
Published online: 08 Oct 2018 *

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