An improved Ant System algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

The Ant System is a distributed metaheuristic that combines an adaptive memory with a local heuristic function to repeatedly construct solutions of hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we present an improved ant system algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with one central depot and identical vehicles. Computational results on fourteen benchmark problems from the literature are reported and a comparison with five other metaheuristic approaches for solving Vehicle Routing Problems is given.