A Tabu Search and Ant Colony System Approach for the Capacitated Location-Routing Problem

In this article we study the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP) which is defined as a combination of two problems: the facility location problem (FLP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP). The CLRP is not just a purely academic construct; it has many applications in the practice. We propose a hybrid approach based on a tabu search algorithm combined with an improved ant colony system to solve the CLRP. The experimental results show the efficiency of our approach in comparison with the other methods found in the literature.