A Hybrid Intelligent Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing with Time Windows

Vehicle routing problems (VRP) arise in many real-life applications within transportation and logistics. This paper considers vehicle routing models with time windows and its hybrid intelligent algorithm. Vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an NP-complete optimization problem. The objective of VRPTW is to use a fleet of vehicles with specific capacity to serve a number of customers with fixed demand and time window constraints. A hybrid intelligent algorithm base on dynamic sweep and ant colony algorithm (DSACA-VRPTW) is proposed to solve this problem. Firstly, each ant's solution might be improved by dynamic sweep algorithm. Then a new improved ant colonies technique is proposed for it. Finally, Solomon's benchmark instances (VRPTW 100-customer) are tested for the algorithm and shows that the DSACA is able to find solutions for VRPTW.