Ant Colony Optimization for the Single Vehicle Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Window

The single vehicle pickup and delivery problem with time window (1-PDPTW) is an important class of vehicle routing problem. This problem aims to find a shortest route for a single vehicle to deliver objects from origin to destination, subject to load limit and time window of delivery. This study develops an ant colony optimization (ACO) method for the 1-PDPTW. Specifically, the constraints of time window and capacity are both considered in the transition probability of ants. Furthermore, we proposed a repair operator to deal with infeasible routes. Experimental results show that the proposed ACO can outperform genetic algorithm and tabu search in terms of solution quality. The results also validate the effectiveness of the repair operator in improving the feasibility and length of routes.