A Clustering Ant Colony Algorithm for the Long-Term Car Pooling Problem

The increased use of private vehicles has caused significant traffic congestion, noise and air pollution. Public transport is often incapable of effectively servicing non-urban areas. Car pooling, where sets of car owners having the same travel destination share their vehicles, has emerged to be a viable possibility for reducing private vehicle usage around the world. This paper describes a clustering ant colony algorithm for solving the long-term car pooling problem. Computational results are given to show the superiority of our approach compared with other meta-heuristics.