Analysis and evaluation of metaheuristic, heuristic, and deterministic methods in providing an optimal path for small, medium, and large networks

Optimal routing is one of the most widely used network issues in transportation planning and aims to find the shortest route among the available routes. Shortest Path Problem Focuses on finding the path with the least distance, time, or cost from source node to destination node. On the other hand, this processing time is very important in applications related to intelligent and user-based transportation. Various deterministic and innovative algorithms are used to perform routing. One of these algorithms is the ant colloquial ant colony optimization algorithm, which is inspired by the ant feeding behavior of ants and deals with the issue of routing from nest to feed, and in the present article, its results with two other algorithms, namely genetics. And Dijkstra is compared. Genetic algorithm is a meta-heuristic algorithm and Dijkstra is a definite algorithm. All three algorithms were tested on three small networks with 200 nodes, medium with 1000 nodes and large with 2000 nodes. Examination of the results showed that the ant colony algorithm gives better results in large networks. The computational time of the ant colony algorithm algorithm is close to the computational time of the genetic algorithm, but it is more accurate and its computational accuracy is the same as the Diextra definitive algorithm method.