Applying the ANT System to the Vehicle Routing Pro

Authors: Bernd Bullnheimer Richard F Hartl Christine Strauss

Publish Date: 1999

Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 285-296

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Abstract

In this paper we use a recently proposed metaheuristic the Ant System to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem in its basic form ie with capacity and distance restrictions one central depot and identical vehicles A “hybrid” Ant System algorithm is first presented and then improved using problemspecific information savings capacity utilization Experiments on various aspects of the algorithm and computational results for fourteen benchmark problems are reported and compared to those of other metaheuristic approaches such as Tabu Search Simulated Annealing and Neural Networks

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