An improved ant system algorithm for the vehicle routing problem

The Ant System is a distributed metaheuristic that combines an adaptive mem ory with a local heuristic function to repeatedly construct solutions of ha rd combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we present an improv ed ant system algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with one central de pot and identical vehicles. Computational results on fourteen benchmark pro blems from the literature are reported and a comparison with five other met aheuristic approaches for solving Vehicle Routing Problems is given.