A two ant colony approaches for the multi-depot capacitated arc routing problem

This paper deals with the capacitated arc routing problem with multiple depots (MD-CARP), a variant of the classical CARP problem. The MD-CARP is NP-hard, to resolve him efficiently, two ant colony approaches (ACs) are developed. The first AC1, is a hybrid approach consisting of two stages: optimization of the tasks order for the insertion by the ant colony optimization and the insertion of tasks by an heuristic saving method. A generalization for the splitting method of ulusoy is incorporated with the ant colony optimization in the second approach, called AC2. Computational experiments carried out on instances taken from the literature prove the performance of the proposed methods.