Adaptive Ant Colony Algorithm for the VRP Solution of Logistics Distribution

In order to conquer the premature convergence problem and lower the cost of computing of the basic Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA), we present an adaptive ant colony algorithm, named AACA, coupled with a Pareto Local Search (PLS) algorithm and apply to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and Capacitated VRP (CVRP). By using the information entropy, the algorithm adjusts the pheromone updating strategy adaptively. Experiments on various aspects of the algorithm and computational results for some benchmark problems are reported. We compare our approach with some classic, powerful meta-heuristics and show that the proposed approach can obtain the better quality of the solutions.