Ant colony optimisation for location routing problem and its application to bill delivery services. Issue 1 (1st January 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Vamshidhar Reddy, M.; Panicker, Vinay V.; Sridharan, R.
• Is Part Of: International journal of logistics systems and management. Volume 14:Issue 1(2013)
• Page Start: 1
• Page End: 37
• Publication Date: 2013-01-01
• Subjects: ant colony optimisation -- ACO -- location routing problem -- LRP -- logistics -- services -- heuristics; Business logistics -- Periodicals; 658.5005
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1742-7967

Abstract

The location-routing problem (LRP) belongs to the field of integrated logistics and is a combination of two problems, the facility-location problem and the vehicle-routing problem. Solving these two problems individually leads to a suboptimal solution. In order to solve a practical large-scale LRP, heuristic approaches become the only alternative as LRP being NP hard. In this work, an ant colony optimisation (ACO)-based heuristic is proposed to solve an LRP. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a practical case with location and routing decisions in a bill delivery services problem is solved. The performance of the ACO-based heuristic is evaluated with the heuristics available in the literature using a statistical procedure based on the hypothesis testing of difference. The results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is feasible and efficient.