Improved ant colony algorithm for the constrained vehicle routing

Abstract

Using the basic ant colony algorithm to solve the constrained vehicle routing problem (CVRP) has some drawbacks such as slow convergence speed and easily getting into local optimum. To effectively solve the CVRP, this paper has proposed a new ant colony algorithm (ACA-CVRP) based on the dynamic update of local and global pheromone and improved transfer rule. In order to shorten the process, the authors introduced the candidate list and 2-opt searching strategy. The experiment result shows that ACA-CVRP achieves better performance in optimum solution compared with other five main meta-heuristic algorithms. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.