D-Ants: Savings Based Ants divide and conquer the vehicle routing problem

This paper presents an algorithm that builds on the Savings based Ant System presented in [Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2002), Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2002] and enhances its performance in terms of computational effort. This is achieved by decomposing the problem and solving only the much smaller subproblems resulting from the decomposition.