A Two-phase Meta Heuristic Approach to the Location-Routing Problem for Transportation Network Planning

In this paper we consider the location-routing problem which combines the facility location and the vehicle routing decisions. In this type of problem, we have to determine the location of facilities within a set of possible locations and routes of the vehicles to meet the demands of number of customers. Since the location-routing problem is NP-hard, it is difficult to obtain optimal solution within a reasonable computational time. Therefore, a two-phase ant colony optimization algorithm is developed which solves facility location problem and vehicle routing problem hierarchically. Its performance is examined through a comparative study. The experimental results show that the proposed ant colony optimization algorithm can be a viable solution method for the general transportation network planning.