An Efficient Solution for the VRP by Using a Hybrid Elite Ant System

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a well-known NP-Hard problem
in operation research which has drawn enormous interest from many researchers during
the last decades because of its vital role in planning of distribution systems and
logistics. This article presents a modified version of the elite ant system (EAS) algorithm
called HEAS for solving the VRP. The new version mixed with insert and swap
algorithms utilizes an effective criterion for escaping from the local optimum points.
In contrast to the classical EAS, the proposed algorithm uses only a global updating
which will increase pheromone on the edges of the best (i.e. the shortest) route and
will at the same time decrease the amount of pheromone on the edges of the worst
(i.e. the longest) route. The proposed algorithm was tested using fourteen instances
available from the literature and their results were compared with other well-known
meta-heuristic algorithms. Results show that the suggested approach is quite effective
as it provides solutions which are competitive with the best known algorithms in the
literature.