A modified Ant Colony Algorithm with local search for capacitated vehicle routing problem

The ant system is a metaheuristic developed for the solution of hard combinatorial optimization problems. Capacitated vehicle routing problem(CVRP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem which has received considerable attention in the last decades. In this paper, through an analysis of the constructive procedure of the solution in the Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA), a CVRP is examined and a hybrid ant colony system coupled with a stochastic local search algorithm(ACAPLS), is proposed. We compare our approach with ACA, some other classic, powerful meta-heuristics and show that our results are competitive.