A Clustering Ant Colony Algorithm for the Long-Term Car Pooling Problem

Abstract

Along with the increase of population and the dispersion of habitation, the use of private cars has been increasing drastically. More and more vehicles on the road have caused significant traffic congestion, noise, and energy waste. Car pooling, which is based on the idea that sets of car owners having the same travel destination share their vehicles, has emerged to be a viable possibility for reducing private car usage around the world. This paper describes a clustering ant colony algorithm for solving the long-term car pooling problem. Computational results are given to show the superiority of the authors’ approach compared with other metaheuristics.