AN ANT COLONY SYSTEM ALGORITHM FOR THE TIME DEPENDENT NETWORK DESIGN PROBLEM

Network design problem is one of the most complicated and yet challenging problems in transportation planning. The Bi-level, non-convex and integer nature of network design problem has made it into one of the most complicated optimization problems. Inclusion of time dimension to the classical network design problem could add to this complexity. In this paper an Ant Colony System (ACS) has been proposed to solve the Time Dependent Network Design Problem (T-NDP). The proposed algorithm has been used to solve different networks: A small size, a medium size and a large scale network. The results show that the proposed model has superior performance compared to the previous method proposed for solving the T-NDP.