Optimizing of Open Vehicle Routing Problem by Using an Efficient Hybrid Meta-heuristic Algorithm

The Open Vehicle Routing Problem (OVRP) is one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics that nowadays and it has been receiving much attention by researchers and scientists. In this Problem, the objective is to define minimized distance traveled of the several vehicles that start to move simultaneously from the depot and visit some customers. It is noted that against to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), it is not necessary that vehicles return to the depot after servicing the customers. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic algorithm in which at the first stage, a modified elite ant colony (EAS) is applied for finding a suboptimal solution, and at the second stage, the insert and swap local search algorithms are used for finding better solutions. Computational results on fifteen standard benchmark problem instances show that the proposed algorithm is comparable in terms of solution quality of other meta-heuristic algorithms.