Application of an ant colony system to optimize the total distance and the customers response time for the real time vehicle routing problem

Abstract

Transport is one of the largest emission driving forces and has many economic and social impacts. Thus, it is crucial to model and optimize practical transportation problems. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for a Real Time Multi-Objective Vehicle Routing Problem which can be described as the problem of designing optimal delivery or collection routes from one or several depots to a number of geographically scattered customers, where we take into account the appearance of new customers over the time and we minimize two objectives : the total distance and response time of customers. Using this model, we perform the resolution by the ant colony system.