Ant Colony System for Optimizing Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW)

Research on the optimization of Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a significant investigation area of ant colony system (ACS). This paper proposes an enhanced ACS, which embeds the sequential insertion heuristic method, to solve VRPTW. The main idea is to organize two respective ant colonies to successively achieve a multiple objective minimization. Experiments on a series of benchmark problems demonstrate the excellent performance of ACS when compared with other optimization methods.

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