An Ant Colony System Based Heuristic Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Delivery and Pickup

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup(VRPSDP) is a general variant of Vehicle Routing Problem(VRP). Although there is a vast literature related to the VRP, little is dealing with the VRPSDP. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm for solving the VRPSDP, based on the Ant Colony System(ACS). In our algorithm, the classical construction phase of the ACS is replaced by an alternative insertion procedure. Numerical experimental results show that our algorithm is effective for solving the VRPSDP, and it gets better solutions than those reported in the literature.