Solving the Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem with an ACS-based Algorithm.

Ant colony system is a metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the behavior of real ants and was proposed by Dorigo et al. as a method for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper we show its successful application to solving a network design problem: Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem. The Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is the problem of designing optimal delivery or collection routes, subject to capacity restrictions, from a given depot to a number of predefined, mutually exclusive and exhaustive clusters. Computational results for several benchmark problems are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]