Ant Colonies Optimization (ACO) for the solution of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new class of meta-heuristic search techniques for hard optimization problems. There are numerous ACO including Ant System (AS), MAXMIN Ant Systems(MMAS) and Ant Colony System (ACS).

In this paper our intention is to define and minimize the objective function of the vehicle routing problem, adjusting properly the ACS algorithm. Our objective is to build a path network with the lowest possible cost.

Keywords:

• Ant Colony Optimization
• Ant Colony System
• meta-heuristic algorithms
• Vehicle Routing Problem