Urban Logistics Distribution Routing Based On Ant Colony Optimization Problems

Nowadays, logistics is becoming more and more important in economy. Many cities in our country have realized the importance of pushing the development of logistics properly and effectively. In order to realize the proper development in the city and overall arrangement in logistics center of logistics, many cities have made the logistics system layout of cities. This can lead to an effectively, unblocked and networked logistics system. In the course of establishing the system, logistics delivery is the core of the city logistics system, because it does not only have an large effect on if the system can be work well but also the transportation system of the city traffic, urban environment system and urban planning system.In the management of delivery, a problem needs being decided frequently is how to seek an most saving vehicle route and give the goods to every customer, which is called the VRP. When added the time facture, it will become the "The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW)". The objective of VRPTW is to serve a set of customers within their predefined time windows at minimum cost. Ant Colony System algorithm (ACS) that is capable of searching multiple search areas simultaneously in the solution space is good in diversification. It has been successfully applied to many NP-hard problems. An improved Ant Colony System algorithm (IACS) with two different types of local search: 2-opt and insertion move is proposed in this paper. The algorithm has been tested on 56 Solomon benchmark problems. The results show that our IACS is competitive with other meta-heuristic approaches in the literature. The results also indicate that such an algorithm outperforms the original heuristic alone.