| Article ID: | iaor20135150 |
| Volume: | 14 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 1 |
| End Page Number: | 37 |
| Publication Date: | May 2013 |
| Journal: | International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management |
| Authors: | Sridharan R, Reddy M Vamshidhar, Panicker Vinay V |
| Keywords: | location, vehicle routing & scheduling, heuristics: ant systems |
The location‐routing problem (LRP) belongs to the field of integrated logistics and is a combination of two problems, the facility‐location problem and the vehicle‐routing problem. Solving these two problems individually leads to a suboptimal solution. In order to solve a practical large‐scale LRP, heuristic approaches become the only alternative as LRP being NP hard. In this work, an ant colony optimisation (ACO)‐based heuristic is proposed to solve an LRP. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a practical case with location and routing decisions in a bill delivery services problem is solved. The performance of the ACO‐based heuristic is evaluated with the heuristics available in the literature using a statistical procedure based on the hypothesis testing of difference. The results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is feasible and efficient.