Pheromone based transportation scheduling system for the multi-vehicle routing problem

We propose a novel and fast method, named "pheromone based transportation scheduling system" (PBTS), to obtain feasible solution for the multi-vehicle routing problem. It is a method inspired by a communication mechanism of living organisms such as ants and bees which communicate with each other and organize the cluster using pheromones. In PBTS, each transportation agent autonomously and independently searches its own route as the partial solution of the vehicle routing problem, where the imitated pheromone is effectively used to dissolve the duplications of customers between routes of agents. Computer simulations show that the PBTS can generate good solutions comparably to the one generated by a genetic algorithm in shorter time.