A hybrid ant colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is one of the most important problems in the optimization of distribution networks. The objective of CVRP, known demands on the cost of originating and terminating at a delivery depot, is to determine the optimal set of routes for a set of vehicles to deliver customers. CVRP is known to be NP-hard problem, and then it is difficult to solve this problem directly when the problem size is large. In this paper, a hybrid algorithm of simulated annealing and ant colony is applied to solve CVRP. It takes the advantages of simulated annealing and ant colony optimization for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to find solutions for CVRP.