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The time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows: a fast ant colony system

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Abstract

This paper proposes a fast ant colony system based solution method to solve realistic instances of the time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows within a few seconds of computation time. Orienteering problems occur in logistic situations where an optimal combination of locations needs to be selected and the routing between these selected locations needs to be optimized. For the time-dependent problem, the travel time between two locations depends on the departure time at the first location. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a fast and effective algorithm for this problem. Numerous experiments on realistic benchmark instances with varying size confirm the state-of-the-art performance and practical relevance of the algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT). The computational resources (Stevin Supercomputer Infrastructure) and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by Ghent University, the Hercules Foundation and the Flemish Government—department EWI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. EDHEC Business School, 24 Avenue Gustave Delory, 59057, Roubaix, France

    Cédric Verbeeck

  2. Leuven Mobility Research Center, KU Leuven, 3001, Leuven, Belgium

    Pieter Vansteenwegen

  3. Industrial Engineering Systems and Product Design, Ghent University, Technologiepark 903, 9052, Zwijnaarde, Belgium

    El-Houssaine Aghezzaf

Authors
  1. Cédric Verbeeck
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  2. Pieter Vansteenwegen
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  3. El-Houssaine Aghezzaf
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Correspondence to Cédric Verbeeck.

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Verbeeck, C., Vansteenwegen, P. & Aghezzaf, EH. The time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows: a fast ant colony system. Ann Oper Res 254, 481–505 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2409-3

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