Solving the general routing problem by artificial ants

Abstract

Routing Problems arise in several areas of distribution management and logistics and their practical significance is widely known. These problems are usually difficult to solve. Therefore, heuristic methods are applied to try to solve them. This paper describes the application of artificial ant colonies to solve the General Routing Problem. For this, the problem is first transformed into a node-routing problem. The transformed problem is solved by applying an ant-based algorithm which has been widely applied to node-routing problems, obtaining good results. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.