Ant colony optimisation based heuristic for one-sided time constraint vehicle routing problem

In this paper, an approach based on Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is described for one-sided time constraint Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), where the delivery of products from the depot to distribution centres has to take place within the maximum permissible time. The problem is described with the aim to achieve maximum customer satisfaction and to develop a solution strategy based on ACO. Here, ACO-based approach is compared with heuristic based on shortest path approach. With the help of computational experiments, it is found that ACO-based approach is more effective approach than the heuristic approach for VRP with one-sided time constraint.