A Two-Stage Hybrid Ant Colony Algorithm for the CVRP

Capacitated vehicle routing problem(CVRP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem which has received considerable attention in the last decades. The Ant Colony system (ACS) is a metaheuristic which is inspired by the trail following behavior of real ant colonies. This paper proposes a two-stage hybrid ACS algorithm for CVRP. The algorithm first minimizes the number of vehicles using ACS and then minimizes travel cost using iterated local search(ILS). In first stage, we revised the ACS algorithm with randomized algorithm(RA) to compute the transition probability. Experimental results for partial benchmark problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.