A parallel version of the d-ant algorithm for the vehicle routing problem

In this paper we study a parallel implementation of the D-Ant algorithm developed by Reimann, Doerner and Hartl [9] for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem. The main idea in this algorithm is to speed up the search by letting the ants solve only sub-problems rather than the whole problem. This algorithm is well suited for parallelization. We propose a mixed parallelization strategy which combines fine-grained with coarse-grained parallelism.