Research On Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows Based On Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows (VRPTW) was an important problem in recent years in the fields of Operational Research, Application Mathematics, Network Analysis, Graph Theory, Computer Applications, Traffic Transportation etc. As a NP-hard problem, VRPTW will increase exponentially along with the adding of customers. So it becomes an important studying trend to solve the vehicle scheduling problem with heuristic algorithm.Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is a new heuristic algorithm to the combinatorial optimization problem. Owing to its positive feedback and effective parallelization and strong lustiness, ACO has been applied in many fields. However, The traditional algorithms have the problems of early convergence or stagnation in the process of combinatorial optimization problems .To solve these problems, this paper proposes a new improved ant colony algorithm of solving the VRPTW problem. Through the analysis of the principle of ACS, the improved ACS was realized by Object-Oriented thought. The test result of a series of Benchmark Problems indicated that the improved ACS was efficient in solving VRPTW.The conclusion of this thesis has significance of realistic theory and application value to the establishment of Logistics Distribution and vehicle routing problem, and it is valuable for the study of ant colony Algorithm.