Multi-ant colony system (MACS) for a vehicle routing problem with backhauls |
| |
Authors: | Yuvraj Gajpal P.L. Abad |
| |
Affiliation: | Michael G DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S4M4 |
| |
Abstract: | The vehicle routing problem with backhaul (VRPB) is an extension of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). In VRPB, there are linehaul as well as backhaul customers. The number of vehicles is considered to be fixed and deliveries for linehaul customers must be made before any pickups from backhaul customers. The objective is to design routes for the vehicles so that the total distance traveled is minimized. We use multi-ant colony system (MACS) to solve VRPB which is a combinatorial optimization problem. Ant colony system (ACS) is an algorithmic approach inspired by foraging behavior of real ants. Artificial ants are used to construct a solution by using pheromone information from previously generated solutions. The proposed MACS algorithm uses a new construction rule as well as two multi-route local search schemes. An extensive numerical experiment is performed on benchmark problems available in the literature. |
| |
Keywords: | Metaheuristic Ant colony Vehicle routing |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |