Abstract: For solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows, this paper proposes an improved ant colony algorithm that integrates neighborhood search strategies. In view of the time window characteristics, the waiting time is added to the state transition rule of the ant colony algorithm. In order to improve the local optimization ability of the algorithm, a variety of node for deletion operations and insertion operations are designed to search the neighborhood of the obtained path. Finally, the improved algorithm is tested using the Solomon standard example, and compared with the currently known optimal solution. The experimental results show that the improved ant colony algorithm has good applicability to the vehicle routing problem with time windows.

Key words: vehicle routing problem, time window, ant colony algorithm, local search