Applying a hybrid ant colony system to the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) has been extensively studied because of the interest in its application in logistics and supply chain management. In this paper, we develop a hybrid algorithm (IACS-SA) that combines the strengths of improved ant colony system (IACS) and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. The results of computational experiments on fourteen VRP benchmark problems show that our IACS-SA produces better solutions than those of other ACS in the literature. The results also indicate that such a hybrid algorithm is comparable with other meta-heuristic algorithms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.