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An Enhanced Ant Colony System for the Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows

Published 1 July 2011Open access
Roberto Montemanni, Dennis Weyland, Luca Maria Gambardella
Citations40
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TL;DR

The resulting algorithm, called Enhanced Ant Colony System is experimentally shown to be extremely effective on some well-known benchmark instances available in the literature.

Abstract

The Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) is a combinatorial optimization problem arising both in industrial scheduling and in transportation. Ant Colony System (ACS) is a well-known metaheuristic framework, and many efficient algorithms for different optimization problems - among them the TOPTW - have been derived from this general framework. In this paper some directions for improving an ACS algorithm for the TOPTW recently appeared in the literature are identified. The resulting algorithm, called Enhanced Ant Colony System is experimentally shown to be extremely effective on some well-known benchmark instances available in the literature.

Keywords

Engineering