A Savings Based Ant System For The Vehicle Routing Problem

In this paper we study the merit of using the well known Savings algorithm within the framework of an Ant System to tackle the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). First, we show the influence of the pheromone information on the solution quality, by comparing the Ant System with a randomized implementation of the Savings algorithm. Second, we evaluate our approach on benchmark data sets. Finally, we provide numerical results about the average and worst case behavior of our algorithm.

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