Ant colony optimization algorithm to solve split delivery vehicle routing problem

As a combinatorial optimization problem, vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a typical NP-hard problem; an assumption that the demand of customers can not be split is given to the traditional VRP formulation. However, the transportation cost can be reduced by means of splitting the demand of customers in practical logistics operation. This paper solved the split delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP) by means of the ant colony algorithm. The integer programming model of the problem is given in this paper, and a corresponding improved ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) based on characteristic of the problem is designed to solve the problem. Some simulation experiments on this algorithm and in comparison with the traditional VRP are conducted, which show that the proposed ACO algorithm is effective and the SDVRP can reduce more total costs than traditional VRP.