An improved Ant System algorithm for theVehicle Routing Problem

The Ant System is a distributed metaheuristic that combines an adaptive memory with alocal heuristic function to repeatedly construct solutions of hard combinatorial optimizationproblems. In this paper, we present an improved ant system algorithm for the Vehicle RoutingProblem with one central depot and identical vehicles. Computational results on fourteenbenchmark problems from the literature are reported and a comparison with five othermetaheuristic approaches for solving Vehicle Routing Problems is given.

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