Offering an Innovative Model to address the Vehicle Routing Issue by Combining Sweep method and Ant Algorithm

Overall, in Many Problems related to transportation engineering, routing and finding the optimal route is an important area of Engineers priority so as to optimize the transportation network. Vehicle routing is one of the most salient problems in research areas with the high number of related investigations over the last two decades, which are followed by tremendous progresses. The Vehicle routing is related to set of issues with a fleet consists of, a number of vehicles start working from one, or more terminals to offer service to the transportation users in different geographic locations. During performance process, the vehicles serve users in a suitable and optimal way in order to reduce costs and be known as a cost-effectiveness transportation mode. The vehicles return to terminals after offering service to users. Availability of capacity, maximum time of offering service, kind of services whether distribution or collection, vehicle diversity and etc, are capable to make routing issue much more complex. Thus, routing has always been known as one of the hard optimization issues. In order to address these problems, researchers try to use innovative methods. The aim of this paper is to offer an innovative combined algorithm to overcome routing issue with indicating the effective factors on determining the transportation network routing. At first, we used the sweep method to arrange the nodes by considering the angle of each node with the central terminal, and then the ant algorithm is used to find the route of each vehicle. Finally, by comparing this method by other existing one, the efficiency of this method is shown.

Keywords:

Routing , Optimization , Ant Algorithm , Sweep Method , Innovative Algorithms