In manual order picking systems, order pickers walk or drive through a distribution warehouse in order to collect items which are requested by (internal or external) customers. In order to perform these operations efficiently, it is usually required that customer orders are combined into (more...

In this paper we propose a hybrid approach for solving vehicle routing problems. The main idea is to combine an Ant System (AS) with a problem specific constructive heuristic, namely the well known Savings algorithm. This differs from previous approaches, where the subordinate heuristic was the...

Vorliegendes Arbeitspapier beschreibt den entsprechenden Einsatz künstlicher Ameisen und diskutiert erste numerische Ergebnisse.

In this paper we propose a hybrid ACO approach to solve a full truckload transportation problem. Hybridization is achieved through the use of a problem specific heuristic.(...)

In this paper we propose a multi-colony Ant System, where the colonies solve a multi-objective optimization problem concerned with goods transportation.

In this paper we propose an ACO approach, where two colonies of ants aim to optimize total costs in a transportation network. This main objective consists of two sub goals, namely fleet size minimization and minimization of the vehicle movement costs, which are conflicting for some regions of...

In this paper we propose an ACO algorithm to optimize the total costs associated with the pickup and delivery of full truckloads under time window constraints in a hub network.(...)

Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new meta-heuristic that has proven its quality and versatility on various combinatorial optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the job shop scheduling problem.(...)

The ant system is a new meta-heuristic for hard combinatorial optimization problems. It is a population-based approach that uses exploitation of positive feedback as well as greedy search. It was first proposed for tackling the well known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), but has been also...

In this paper we present and analyze the application of an Ant System to the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls and Time Windows (VRPBTW). At the core of the algorithm we use an Insertion procedure to construct solutions. We provide results on the learning and runtime behavior of the...