Traveling Salesman Problems with Replenishment Arcs and Improved Ant Colony Algorithms

Abstract

The traveling salesman problem (TSP), can be used as a typical combinatorial optimization problem, to describe a wide variety of practical engineering optimization problems in various fields. In this study, the problem of personnel and equipment utilization in the transportation industry was abstracted, a more general class of TSPs with replenishment arcs was proposed, an optimization model to minimize the total travel time was established, the ant colony optimization algorithm to solve the standard TSP was improved, and an improved ant colony algorithm based on dynamic heuristic information was designed. Simulation experiments showed that the algorithm can account for the cumulative mileage constraint and search for the shortest path, effectively solving the TSP with replenishment arcs.