An ant colony system approach for variants of traveling salesman problem with time windows

Abstract

The Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows has important applications in routing and scheduling and has been extensively studied in literature. In the paper, a mathematical formulation of the temporal-Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows is presented and a metaheuristic based on Ant Colony System is proposed and implemented. Computational experience on a benchmark problem is reported and a case study is analyzed, where interesting results are obtained