An improved ant colony optimization based algorithm for the capacitated arc routing problem

The capacitated arc routing problem is a well-studied problem in the Transportation/Logistics/OR literature. The problem consists of identifying the minimum cost routes required to service (e.g., pickup or deliver) demand located along the edges of a network. Unfortunately, the problem belongs to the set of NP-Hard problems; consequently, numerous heuristic and metaheuristic solution approaches have been developed to solve it. In this article, an ant colony optimization based metaheuristic is presented. Modifications are introduced for various components of the ant colony metaheuristics; specifically for those associated with the ‘initial population’, the ‘ant decision rule’ and the ‘local search procedure’. The new metaheuristic was tested on seven standard test networks for the capacitated arc routing problem. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs extremely well vis-à-vis the state-of-the-art metaheuristics for the problem.