Hybrid ANT Colony Algorithm for the Multi-depot Periodic Open Capacitated Arc Routing Problem

In this paper we present a hybrid technique that applies an ant colony optimization algorithm followed by simulated annealing local search approach to solving the Multi-Depot Periodic Open Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (MDPOCARP). This problem is a new variant of OCARP that has never been studied in the literature and consists of determining optimal routes in each period where each route starts from a given depot, visits a list of required edges and finishes by the last one. The final edge of the route is not required to be a depot. We developed a constructive heuristic, called Nearest Insertion Heuristic (NIH) to build an initial solution. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on three different benchmarks sets and numerical results show that the proposed approach achieves highly efficient results.