An Efficient Solution for the VRP by Using a Hybrid Elite Ant System

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a well-known NP-Hard problemin operation research which has drawn enormous interest from many researchers duringthe last decades because of its vital role in planning of distribution systems andlogistics. This article presents a modified version of the elite ant system (EAS) algorithmcalled HEAS for solving the VRP. The new version mixed with insert and swapalgorithms utilizes an effective criterion for escaping from the local optimum points.In contrast to the classical EAS, the proposed algorithm uses only a global updatingwhich will increase pheromone on the edges of the best (i.e. the shortest) route andwill at the same time decrease the amount of pheromone on the edges of the worst(i.e. the longest) route. The proposed algorithm was tested using fourteen instancesavailable from the literature and their results were compared with other well-knownmeta-heuristic algorithms. Results show that the suggested approach is quite effectiveas it provides solutions which are competitive with the best known algorithms in theliterature