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A parallel improved ant colony optimization for multi-depot vehicle routing problem

  • Theoretical Paper
  • Published:
Journal of the Operational Research Society

Abstract

This paper presents a method for solving multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP). First, a virtual central depot is added to transfer MDVRP to the multi-depot vehicle routing problem with the virtual central depot (V-MDVRP), which is similar to a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with the virtual central depot as the origin. An improved ant colony optimization with coarse-grain parallel strategy, ant-weight strategy and mutation operation, is presented for the V-MDVRP. The computational results for 23 benchmark problems are reported and compared to those of other ant colony optimizations.

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Acknowledgements

This research is financed by the National Science Foundation for Post-doctoral Scientists of China 20080440168 and the Doctoral Program Foundation for Young Scholar of Institutions of Higher Education of China through project 20070151013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Transportation Management College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, P.R. China

    B Yu & Z-Z Yang

  2. College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Hebei Agricultural University, Hebei, P.R. China

    J-X Xie

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  1. B Yu
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  2. Z-Z Yang
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  3. J-X Xie
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Correspondence to Z-Z Yang.

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Yu, B., Yang, ZZ. & Xie, JX. A parallel improved ant colony optimization for multi-depot vehicle routing problem. J Oper Res Soc 62, 183–188 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2009.161

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2009.161

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