Ant colony optimisation for location routing problem and its application to bill delivery services Online publication date: Fri, 31-May-2013
by M. Vamshidhar Reddy; Vinay V. Panicker; R. Sridharan
International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management (IJLSM), Vol. 14, No. 1, 2013
Abstract: The location-routing problem (LRP) belongs to the field of integrated logistics and is a combination of two problems, the facility-location problem and the vehicle-routing problem. Solving these two problems individually leads to a suboptimal solution. In order to solve a practical large-scale LRP, heuristic approaches become the only alternative as LRP being NP hard. In this work, an ant colony optimisation (ACO)-based heuristic is proposed to solve an LRP. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a practical case with location and routing decisions in a bill delivery services problem is solved. The performance of the ACO-based heuristic is evaluated with the heuristics available in the literature using a statistical procedure based on the hypothesis testing of difference. The results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is feasible and efficient.
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