Using Ant Colony System and Local Search Methods to Solve VRPTW

The vehicle routing problem with Time windows (VRPTW) issue has attracted significant attention in the operations research community in recent years. The primary objective of VRPTW is defined as the minimization of the number of routes or vehicles. Minimization of the total travel cost is secondary objective. In this paper, VRPTW is examined and a hybrid ant colony system coupled with randomized algorithm (RA) and Pareto local search (PLS) algorithm (RPACS-VRPTW), is proposed. The RPACS-VRPTW can efficiently reduce costs of the constructive procedure of the solution in the ant colony system (ACS). Computational results for partial benchmark problems show that the approach proposed outperforms some other previously known heuristic methods.