A hybrid ant colony algorithm for the capacitated location-routing problem

The capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP) belongs to the field of logistics of transportation. The CLRP appears as a combination of two difficult problems: the facility location problem (FLP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP).It is an NP-hard problem. In order to solve practical large scale capacitated LRP, We propose a hybrid ant colony algorithm to solve the CLRP. To compare the proposed algorithm with other heuristic algorithms, a series of computational experiments are done on randomly generated test problems. The simulation results demonstrate that the hybrid ant colony algorithm is feasible and efficient.