| Article ID: | iaor20013949 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 89 |
| Start Page Number: | 319 |
| End Page Number: | 328 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 1999 |
| Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
| Authors: | Hartl Richard F., Bullnheimer Bernd, Strauss Christine |
| Keywords: | programming: travelling salesman |
The Ant System is a distributed metaheuristic that combines an adaptive memory with a local heuristic function to repeatedly construct solutions of hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we present an improved ant system algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with one central depot and identical vehicles. Computational results on fourteen benchmark problems from the literature are reported and a comparison with five other metaheuristic approaches for solving Vehicle Routing Problems is given.