The time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows : a fast ant colony system

This paper proposes a fast ant colony system based solution method to solve realistic instances of the time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows within a few seconds of computation time. Orienteering problems occur in logistic situations where an optimal combination of locations needs to be selected and the routing between these selected locations needs to be optimized. For the time-dependent problem, the travel time between two locations depends on the departure time at the first location. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a fast and effective algorithm for this problem. Numerous experiments on realistic benchmark instances with varying size confirm the state-of-the-art performance and practical relevance of the algorithm