A Two-Pheromone Trail Ant Colony System Approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Multiple Products and Product Incompatibility

Abstract

This paper considers a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) subject to time windows for every customer, multiple products and incompatibility between them. Since the problem is NP-hard, the approach to achieve feasible solutions is an Ant Colony System with Two-Pheromone with the objective of minimizing routing cost and vehicle fleet size. Experiments are carried out using instances from literature showing competitive solutions in relatively short computational times.