An efficient solution for the VRP by using a hybrid elite ant system

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a well-known NP-Hard problem in operation research which has drawn enormous interest from many researchers during the last decades because of its vital role in planning of distribution systems and logistics. This article presents a modified version of the elite ant system (EAS) algorithm called HEAS for solving the VRP. The new version mixed with insert and swap algorithms utilizes an effective criterion for escaping from the local optimum points. In contrast to the classical EAS, the proposed algorithm uses only a global updating which will increase pheromone on the edges of the best (i.e. the shortest) route and will at the same time decrease the amount of pheromone on the edges of the worst (i.e. the longest) route. The proposed algorithm was tested using fourteen instances available from the literature and their results were compared with other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms. Results show that the suggested approach is quite effective as it provides solutions which are competitive with the best known algorithms in the literature. © 2006-2014 by CCC Publications.