An improved ant colony algorithm based on vehicle routing problem

The vehicle routing problem is a classical combinatorial optimization and integer programming problem. This paper proposed an improved ant colony algorithm to avoid the premature convergence and increase convergence speed, its main improvements including a novel probabilistic state transition, dynamically adjusting the value of the pheromone volatile parameter, and coupled with local optimization heuristics(2-Opt heuristics). Apply this algorithm to instance Eil22, the result shows that the proposed algorithm can obtain the optimal solution rapidly and accurately.