PARALLEL COOPERATIVE SAVINGS BASED ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION - MULTIPLE SEARCH AND DECOMPOSITION APPROACHES

In this paper we study different parallel implementations of the Savings based Ant System algorithm developed for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem. We analyze the effects of low-level parallelization, multiple search strategies and domain decomposition approaches. For the different strategies speedup and efficiency as well as solution quality are reported. Different information exchanges are analyzed within the multiple search strategies.