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Integrated Ant Colony and Tabu Search approach for time dependent vehicle routing problems with simultaneous pickup and delivery

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Abstract

Today manufacturers have become much more concerned with the coordination of both manufacturing (of new products) and recycling (of reusable resources) operations. This requires simultaneous scheduling of both forward and reverse flows of goods over a supply chain network. This paper studies time dependent vehicle routing problems with simultaneous pickup and delivery (TD-VRPSPD). We formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming model, where the time step function is used to calculate the travel time. To efficiently solve this complex problem, we develop a hybrid algorithm that integrates both Ant Colony System (ACS) and Tabu Search (TS) algorithms. Our algorithm uses the pheromones, travel time and vehicle residual loading capacity as a factor structure according to the characteristics of TD-VRPSPD. In our computational experiments, 56 groups of benchmark instances are used to evaluate the performance of our hybrid algorithm. In addition, we compare the performance of our hybrid algorithm with those of individual ACS and TS algorithms. The computational results suggest that our hybrid algorithm outperform stand-alone ACS and the TS algorithms.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Fund of China under Grant Nos. 71171126 and 61170095, the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education No. 20130078110001, the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Fund under Grant No. 2011BGL015, the SRF for ROCS of SEM, 211 Project for Shanghai University of Finance and Economics of China. We would like to thank anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai , 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Tao Zhang

  2. Departments of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA , 98195, USA

    W. Art Chaovalitwongse

  3. School of Computer Science, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Yuejie Zhang

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  1. Tao Zhang
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  2. W. Art Chaovalitwongse
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  3. Yuejie Zhang
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Correspondence to Yuejie Zhang.

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Zhang, T., Chaovalitwongse, W.A. & Zhang, Y. Integrated Ant Colony and Tabu Search approach for time dependent vehicle routing problems with simultaneous pickup and delivery. J Comb Optim 28, 288–309 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-014-9741-1

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