Ant searching algorithm for vehicle routing problem

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a typical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimisation. Theoretically speaking, only relatively small-sized problems can be solved to get the optimal solution. Based on the recently developed new intelligent optimization idea, the artificial ant system, we propose a quick ant searching algorithm for solving VRP. After defining the basic state transition probabilities of artificial ants and combining the local searching strategy, we use the number of iterations to control the running time of the algorithm. Therefore, the method can be implemented with practicality. Series of numerical examples were tested and verified, which shows the better performance of the proposed algorithm compared with some classical algorithms.