Ant colony optimization approach for the capacitated vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick-up

We propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to the NPhard Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Delivery and Pick-up (VRPSDP). In VRPSDP, commodities are delivered to customers from a single depot utilizing a fleet of identical vehicles and empty packages are collected from the customers and transported back to the depot. The objective is to minimize the total distance traveled. The algorithm is tested with the well-known benchmark problems from the literature. The experimental study indicates that our approach produces comparable results to those of the benchmark problems in the literature

Ant colony optimization and its application to the vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a population-based metaheuristic that can be used to find approximate solutions to difficult optimization problems. It was first introduced for solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem. Since then many implementations of ACO have been proposed for a variety of combinatorial optimization. In this chapter, ACO is applied to the Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery (VRPPD). VRPPD determines a set of vehicle routes originating and ending at a single depot and visiting all customers exactly once. The vehicles are not only required to deliver goods but also to pick up some goods from the customers. The objective is to minimize the total distance traversed. The chapter first provides an overview of ACO approach and presents several implementations to various combinatorial optimization problems. Next, VRPPD is described and the related literature is reviewed, Then, an ACO approach for VRPPD is discussed. The approach proposes a new visibility function which attempts to capture the “delivery” and “pickup” nature of the problem. The performance of the approach is tested using well-known benchmark problems from the literature

Energy preserving model order reduction of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation

An energy preserving reduced order model is developed for two dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE) with plane wave solutions and with an external potential. The NLSE is discretized in space by the symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (SIPG) method. The resulting system of Hamiltonian ordinary differential equations are integrated in time by the energy preserving average vector field (AVF) method. The mass and energy preserving reduced order model (ROM) is constructed by proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) Galerkin projection. The nonlinearities are computed for the ROM efficiently by discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). Preservation of the semi-discrete energy and mass are shown for the full order model (FOM) and for the ROM which ensures the long term stability of the solutions. Numerical simulations illustrate the preservation of the energy and mass in the reduced order model for the two dimensional NLSE with and without the external potential. The POD-DMD makes a remarkable improvement in computational speed-up over the POD-DEIM. Both methods approximate accurately the FOM, whereas POD-DEIM is more accurate than the POD-DMD

An ant colony algorithm for the mixed vehicle routing problem with backhauls

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery (VRPPD) is a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem where the vehicles are not only required to deliver goods but also to pick up some goods from the customers. The Mixed Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (MVRPB) is a special case of VRPPD where each customer has either a delivery or a pickup demand to be satisfied and the customers can be visited in any order along the route. Given a fleet of vehicles and a set of customers with known pickup or delivery demands MVRPB determines a set of vehicle routes originating and ending at a single depot and visiting all customers exactly once. The objective is to minimize the total distance traversed with the least number of vehicles. For this problem, we propose an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm with a new visibility function which attempts to capture the “delivery” and “pickup” nature of the problem. Our numerical tests to compare the performance of the proposed approach with those of the well-known benchmark problems reveal that the proposed approach provides encouraging results