A multi-ant colony system for vehicle routing problems

Abstract

In order to accelerate the convergence rate of the ant colony algorithm and avoid the stagnation behavior, a novel ant colony system developed from MAX-MIN ant system is present. The methods including Multi-ant colony, improving state transition rules, introducing parameter mutation method according the convergent requirement are used in the algorithm. It is applied to the vehicle routing problem with time window. Experimental results show that algorithm has much higher capacity of global optimization and improve the speed of convergence efficiently.