Ant colony optimization with human-computer cooperative strategy for two-echelon vehicle routing problem

This paper proposed an ant colony optimization with human-computer cooperative strategy for solving the two-echelon vehicle routing problem(2E- VRP). Firstly, we use a computer game to implement the human cognition sampling, which is specially devised for 2E- VRP problem. Secondly, the human satellite-to-customer assignment strategy is applied to analyze the game results for customers' assignment to the satellite. Moreover, a global pheromone updating rule and a solution construction method are exploited to further improve the global search efficiency. The proposed algorithm benefits by giving free rein to enhance the global exploitation ability of ACO by human-computer cooperative strategy. The computational results from public test set indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed method for the two-echelon vehicle routing problem.