Use of ant colony system in solving vehicle routing problem with time window constraints

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem with time window constraints (VRPTW) is an extension of the original vehicle routing problem (VRP). It is a well-known NP-hard problem which has several real-life applications. Meta-heuristics have been often tried to solve VRTPW problem. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a suitable version of Ant colony optimization heuristic to efficiently solve VRPTW problem. Experimentation with the developed version of Ant colony optimization has shown that it succeeds in general in obtaining results obtained with earlier version and often even better than the results that are better than the corresponding results available in literature which have been obtained using even previously developed hybridized versions of ACO. In many cases, the obtained results are comparable with the best results available in literature.