Hybrid ant colony optimization algorithm for two echelon vehicle routing problem

A hybrid heuristic ant colony algorithm is proposed and applied to solving the two echelon vehicle routing problem, which combines three heuristic or meta-heuristics. The problem is divided into m+1 CVRP by a separation strategy (distance-based cluster). Then better feasible solutions are built by an improve ant colony optimization with multiple neighborhood descent (IACO_MND), which is taken as the initial solution of the threshold-based local search procedure, two different neighborhood structures, i.e., threshold-based insert and threshold-based swap are successively used. Computational results on the 22 benchmark problems with the size ranging from 20 to 50 show that the proposed hybrid algorithm can find the best known solution for some problems in short time, which indicates that the proposed method outperforms other algorithm in literature. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]