Improving vehicle routing using a customer waiting time colony.

Sa'adah, Samer; Ross, Peter; Paechter, Ben

Abstract

In the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), there are two main objectives. The primary objective is to reduce the number of vehicles, the secondary one is to minimise the total distance travelled by all vehicles. This paper describes some experiments with multiple ant colony systems, in particular a Triple Ant Colony System TACS, in which one colony (VMIN) tries to minimise the number of vehicles, one (DMIN) tries to minimise the total distance and a third (CWTsMAX) tries to maximise customer waiting time. The inclusion of this third colony improves the results very significantly, compared to not using it and to a range of other options. Experiments are conducted on Solomons 56 benchmark problems. The results are comparable to those obtained by other state-of-the-art approaches.

Citation

Sa'adah, S., Ross, P., & Paechter, B. (2004, April). Improving vehicle routing using a customer waiting time colony

• Start Date: Apr 5, 2004
• End Date: Apr 7, 2004
• Publication Date: 2004-03
• Deposit Date: May 11, 2010
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 3004
• Pages: 188-198
• Book Title: Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization
• ISBN: 978-3-540-21367-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24652-7_19
• Keywords: vehicle routing; time windows; triple ant colony systems; customer waiting time
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3349