A time-based pheromone approach for the ant system

Abstract

The ant system (AS) is a metaheuristic approach originally developed for solving the traveling salesman problem. AS has been successfully applied to various hard combinatorial optimization problems and different variants have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a time-based pheromone approach for AS (TbAS). Due to this nature TbAS is applicable to routing problems involving time-windows. The novelty in TbAS is the multi-layer pheromone network structure which implicitly utilizes the service time information associated with the customers as a heuristic information. To investigate the performance of TbAS, we use the well-known vehicle routing problem with time-windows as our testbed and we conduct an extensive computational study using the Solomon [29] instances. Our results reveal that the proposed time-based pheromone approach is effective in obtaining good quality solutions.

Available Versions of this Item

• A time-based pheromone approach for the ant system. (deposited 30 Jan 2012 11:13) [Currently Displayed]
  • A time-based pheromone approach for the ant system. (deposited 22 Aug 2012 15:39)