Ant System for a Multi-vehicle Routing Problem

This paper introduces the multi-vehicle routing problem(MRP) which is different from the traveling sales problem(TSP), and presents the ant system(AS) applied to the MRP. The proposed MRP is a distributive model of TSP since many vehicles are used, not just one salesman in TSP and even some constraints exist. In the AS, a set of cooperating agents called vehicles cooperate to find good solutions to the MRP. To make the proposed MRP extended more, Tokyo city model(TCM) is proposed. The goal in TCM is to find a set of routes that minimizes the total traveling time such that each vehicle can reach its destination as soon as possible. The results show that the AS can effectively find a set of routes minimizing the total traveling time even though the TCM has some constraints.