A Novel Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem VRP is one of the most important problems in the field of Operations Research and logistics. This paper presents a novel Ant Colony Optimization algorithm abbreviated as ACO_PLM to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem efficiently. By virtue of this algorithm we wish to propose novel pheromone deposition, local search & mutation strategies to solve the VRP efficiently and facilitate rapid convergence. The ACO_PLM provides better results compared to other heuristics, which is apparent from the experimental results and comparisons with other existing algorithms when tested on the twelve benchmark instances.