Abstract
The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem often met in many fields of industrial applications. However a logistics company has more than one depot, the VRPTW is not suitable. To overcome this limitation, this paper built the mathematics model of multi-depot vehicle routing problem with time windows (MDVRPTW). The MDVRPTW is a NP-hard problem. To deal with the problem efficiently, an improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is developed in this paper. To improve the performance of ACO, the paper improves the basic ant colony algorithm which can avoids being into local optimal solution and combines the nearest neighbour search method.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NSFC (Grant No. 71401020), NPOPSS (Grant No. 14BGL055), HPOPSS (Grant No. HB15GL111) and Human Social Science for Universities of Hebei (Grant No. SD151011, Grant No. BJ2016057).
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Ma, Y., Han, J., Kang, K., Yan, F. (2017). An Improved ACO for the Multi-depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. In: Xu, J., Hajiyev, A., Nickel, S., Gen, M. (eds) Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 502. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1837-4_96
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1837-4_96
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