A Hybrid Ant Colony System For Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

Vehicle Routing Problem(abbr. VRP) was an important problem in recent years in the fields of Operational Research, Application Mathematics, Network Analysis, Graph Theory, Computer Applications, Traffic Transportation etc. It was derived from the field of Traffic Transportation and had widely applied to communication, production, national defense, biology etc. Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows(abbr. VRPTW) was mainly researched in this paper. Proven to be a NP-hard problem, it was difficult to get the exact solutions to VRPTW with numerous nodes. How to get satisfied solutions in short computational time had become the hot issue in the VRP field.Ant colony system(abbr. ACS), an evolution algorithm, presented by people enlightened by the real ant colony in nature, was efficient in solving Combinatorial Optimization problems. Many improved ACS with more efficiency had been proposed since the ACS was presented.The theme of this paper was that a better improved ACS with short computational time and good result was proposed to solve the VRPTW, The mainly researched content was as follows:(1) Through the complexity analysis, the model was built in the standpoint of the third-party logistics distribution center.(2) Through the analysis of current ACS and the test of experiments, the advantages and disadvantages of the algorithm were summarized. The improved ACS-Hybrid Ant Colony System(abbr. HACS) was presented to solve VRPTW efficiently and effectively.(3) Through the analysis of the principle of ACS, the HACS was realized by Object-Oriented thought. The test results of a series of Benchmark Problems indicated that HACS was efficient in solving VRPTW.Presented to solve the VRPTW, HACS played an important role in solving the inconsistency between information flow and logistics distribution and scientifically improved the efficiency of Logistics Distribution, which did not had a great significance only in the theoretical research but also in the applied science for the development of E-commerce and Logistics Distribution.