An Effective Ant Colony Optimization for Solving the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most important combinational optimization problems that nowadays, it has been received much attention by researchers and scientists. In this Problem, the objective is to define minimized distance traveled of the multiple vehicle routing problem that start to move simultaneously from depot and return to the depot after visiting customers, if firstly, each node is visited by only one vehicle and secondly, each vehicle does not load during the route morethan its capacity.In this paper, aimed at the disadvantages existed in the current Ant Colony System (ACS) algorithms, a modification to pheromone evaluation model of ACS is proposed. This trigonometric function can avoid premature convergence of ACS and exploits more strong solutions. Comparison between this method and famous meta-heuristic algorithms shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Keywords:

NP-hard Problems , Ant Colony System , 3-Opt Algorithm. Vehicle Routing Problem