A Max-Min Ant System based on Decomposition for the Multi-Depot Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Multi-depot Cumulative Capacited Vehicle Routing Problem (MDCCVRP) is a relatively new research field in Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), which is composed of several traditional VRP variants. This model is usually applicable to the logistics and transportation problems after the disaster. A decomposition-based Max-Min ant system (DMMAS) algorithm is proposed to solve MDCCVRP in this paper. First of all, a new indicator which measures the nearness between two routes for multi-depot problems is proposed. The original problem is decomposed into a series of smaller subproblems, and then, after the optimization phase, a specific pheromone communication rule between the master problem and subproblems is adopted to guide the search direction of ants. Finally, when the search gets into a halt, a mechanism of perturbation is used to get rid of the local optimality. The algorithm is tested on many benchmark problems and the experimental results show that our algorithm can effectively improve the performance in most cases compared to several state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms.