Modified Ant Colony Optimization with Route Elimination and Pheromone Reset for Multiple Pickup and Multiple Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) has many applications in goods distribution and goods transportation. Today, many companies have requirements for VRP with multiple pickup and multiple delivery within due time. This problem is called multiple pickup and multiple delivery vehicle routing problem with time window (PDPTW). PDPTW has many constraints and ant colony optimization (ACO) has been used to solve it although ACO creates too many infeasible routes. Moreover, it often gets trapped in local optimum. To solve these problems, this paper proposed an improved ACO by using the route elimination technique and the pheromone reset technique. The ACO with route elimination technique, it has proven to solve the PDPTW problem with increased performance. The proposed technique was tested on datasets from the Li & Lim’s PDPTW benchmark problems and provided more satisfactory results compared to other ACO techniques.