A COMBINATION OF SWEEP ALGORITHM AND ELITE ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION FOR SOLVING THE MULTIPLE TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM

solving the MTSP which can be explained as the problem of designing collection of routes from one depot to a number of customers subject to side constraints. At the first stage, the MTSP is solved by the sweep algorithm, and at the second stage, the Elite Ant Colony Optimization ( AS elite ) and 3-opt local search are used for improving solutions. The performance of our algorithm has been tested on 6 MTSP benchmark problems and it shows that the proposed SW+ AS elite performs well and is quite competitive with other meta-heuristic algorithms. 1. INTRODICTION A lot of research has been carried out in the field of logistics from the traveling salesman problem to complex dynamic routing problems. Among the prominent problems in the distribution and logistics are the Traveling Salesman Problem and its extensions. These problems have been widely studied for many years, mainly because of their applications in real world logistics and transportation problems. The multiple traveling salesman problem is a generalization of the well-known traveling salesman problem [3], where one or more salesman can be used in the solution. The MTSP can in general be defined as follows.

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