Solve the film-copy deliverer problem using ant colony system

The film-copy deliverer problem (FDP) was presented in 1993. Since then, there has been two main algorithms to solve it: in the first algorithm, one transforms FDP into TSP and then solves it; in the second one uses a special genetic algorithm established by Cheng, R.W. & Gen, M. in 1995. In this paper, the limitations of these two algorithms are firstly analyzed, such as the dimensional increase and the local optimization, etc. And then, a novel heuristic algorithm based on ant colony system (ACS) is presented to solve the FDP, in which some new strategies such as adding new parameters and killing artificial ants are introduced. A randomly generated FDP is given. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective for solving FDP.