A hybrid ant colony algorithm for vehicle routing problem with time windows

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem is proved as aNP-Hard problem. VRPTW involves the routing of a set of vehicles with limited capacity from a central depot to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands and pre-defined time windows. In this study, a new hybrid algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) is provided to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The proposed algorithm combines the advantages of ACO and GA. Then a mathematical programming formulation for the problem is given. The performance of the model and the heuristic approaches are evaluated using instances generated from a set of classic examples. Results of numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm is an effective tool in solving VRPTW problem. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.