Vehicle Routing Problem with Uncertain Costs via a Multiple Ant Colony System

DOI: 10.5176/2251-1911_CMCGS14.08

Authors: Nihat Engin Toklu, Luca Maria Gambardella, Roberto Montemanni

Abstract: We consider the capacitated vehicle routing problem with uncertain travel costs, where the uncertainty represents the realistic factors like unfriendly weather conditions, traffic jams, etc. In this paper, we present a multiple ant colony system approach in which ant colony optimization processes work concurrently to produce multiple solutions. Experimental results on different types of vehicle routing problem instances (with clustered customers, randomly placed customers, and mixed of the previous two), each instance having 200 customers are finally discussed.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem, robust optimization, metaheuristic algorithms