Max-Min Ant System to Solve Vehicle Routing Problem Case Study: THANTIP Factory of Drinking Water

Abstract

This research was presented meta-heuristic for solving the vehicle routing problem. The problems were acombinatorial optimization and NP-hard problem. The Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) was applied to solve forsolutions in order to minimize the total distance traveled. The demand of each customer was certain and thevehicle capacity was limited. MMAS consisted of tree phase. The first was to construct and initial feasiblesolution and the second; the solution was improved by applying local search methods. There were 2Opt;Swap operator and Move exchanges procedure. Finally, pheromone updating. The computation resultsshowed the proposed heuristic provided good solution by reducing travel distance from 154.3 kilometer perday to 119.3 kilometer per day (29.59% reduced) and it was a reasonable computational time.