Theoretical Paper
Journal of the Operational Research Society (2009) 60, 1012–1025. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602644 Published online 9 July 2008
An ant colony optimization metaheuristic hybridized with tabu search for open vehicle routing problems
X-Y Li1, P Tian1 and S C H Leung2
- 1Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, P.R. China
- 2City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Correspondence: X-Y Li, Odette School of Business, University of Windsor, Windsor City, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada. E-mail: lixiangyong@163.com
Received November 2006; Accepted April 2008; Published online 9 July 2008.
Abstract
This paper studies the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP), in which the vehicle does not return to the starting depot after serving the last customer or, if it does, it must make the same trip in the reverse order. We propose an ant colony optimization-based metaheuristic for solving the OVRP. It is a 
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ant system hybridized with tabu search, which is implemented in the hyper-cube framework. Additionally, a post-optimization strategy is incorporated to further improve the best-found solutions. We experimentally check the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing its results with the existing methods in the literature, on a wide range of benchmark instances.
Keywords:
distribution, vehicle routing, ant colony optimization, heuristics
