An Ant Colony Optimization Method for Prize-collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows

Focused on a variation of the Euclidean traveling salesman problem (TSP), namely the prize-collecting traveling salesman problem with time windows (PCTSPTW), this paper presents a novel ant colony optimization solving method. The time window constraints are considered in the computation for the probability of selection of the next city. The parameters of the algorithm are analyzed by experiments. Numerical results also show that the proposed method is effective for the PCTSPTW problem.