2018 Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 362-377
The capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem that has wide applicability in real-world logistics problems. The CARP involves finding a set of routes with minimum costs for a set of demand arcs with vehicle capacity limitations. Due to its NP-hard property, the CARP cannot be solved within reasonable time by exact algorithms. In recent years, metaheuristic algorithms have been developed to solve the CARP. Here, we propose an ant colony optimization algorithm with path relinking (ACOPR) to solve the problem. The proposed ACOPR was tested with seven benchmark sets of 181 instances from the literature for its effectiveness and compared with the existing best-performing metaheuristics. The computational results show that ACOPR is competitive with the compared state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms.
