Open Capacitated ARC routing problem by Hybridized Ant Colony Algorithm

The Open Capacitated Arc Routing Problem OCARP is a well-known NP-hard real-world combinatorial optimization problem. It consists of determining optimal routes for vehicles in a given service area at a minimal cost distance. The main real application for OCARP is the Meter Reader Routing Problem (MRRP). In MRRP problem, each worker in the electric (or gas) company must visit and read the electric (or gas) meters to a set of customers by starting his route from the first customer on his visit list and finishing with the last one. The worker leaves where he wants once all the associated customers have been visited. In this paper, a metaheuristic called an Hybridized Ant Colony Algorithm (HACA) is developed and hybridized with a local search algorithm that involves the 2-opt, Swap, Relocate and Cross-exchange moves to solve OCARP problem. Computational results conducted on five different sets of OCARP-instances showed that our proposed algorithm HACA has reached good and competitive results on benchmark instances for the problem.

Automated summary

The OCARP problem is a combinatorial optimization problem in real world applications, mainly used in MRRP. By combining the HACA algorithm with a local search algorithm, good and competitive results can be achieved for this problem.