A hybrid ant colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Author

Zhen, Tong ; Zhu, Yuhua ; Zhang, Qiuwen

Author_Institution

Coll. of Inf. Sci. & Eng., Henan Univ. of Technol., Zhengzhou

fYear

2008

fDate

12-14 Dec. 2008

Firstpage

935

Lastpage

939

Abstract

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is one of the most important problems in the optimization of distribution networks. The objective of CVRP, known demands on the cost of originating and terminating at a delivery depot, is to determine the optimal set of routes for a set of vehicles to deliver customers. CVRP is known to be NP-hard problem, and then it is difficult to solve this problem directly when the problem size is large. In this paper, a hybrid algorithm of simulated annealing and ant colony is applied to solve CVRP. It takes the advantages of simulated annealing and ant colony optimization for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to find solutions for CVRP.

Keywords

simulated annealing; transportation; NP-hard problem; capacitated vehicle routing problem; distribution networks; hybrid ant colony algorithm; simulated annealing; Ant colony optimization; Cost function; Educational institutions; Educational technology; Information science; Logistics; NP-hard problem; Routing; Simulated annealing; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

IT in Medicine and Education, 2008. ITME 2008. IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Xiamen

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-3616-3

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2511-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ITME.2008.4744004

Filename

4744004