Tobacco distribution vehicle routing program and the resolving method

The problem of tobacco distribution was resolved as two phases: static delivery routing programming phase and dynamic vehicle routing daily schedule phase. The static phase was modeled as the multiple traveling salesmen problem (MTSP) with workload balance. A hybrid ant colony optimization algorithm (HACO) was developed for this MTSP. The proposed HACO was tested on some benchmark instances in literatures with the objective of minimizing the maximum distance traveled by each salesman, which is related with balancing the workload among salesmen. Computational results show that the HACO is competitive. One real tobacco distribution instance was resolved by proposed method which result in distribution cost reducing and efficiency improving.