Application of an Ant Colony System – Node (ACS – N) algorithm in the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)

Abstract

Ant colony Optimization (ACO) is a relatively new class of metaheuristic search techniques for hard optimization problems. In this paper we focus on the definition and minimization of the objective function of the VPR using an Ant Colony System \u2013 Node (ACS \u2013 N) algorithm. The (ACS \u2013 N) algorithm is implemented for an eight node graph with respective demands. Moreover, in this paper we study the effect of the number of the ants to the value of the objective function.