An optimized scalable multi-ant colony system for multi-depot vehicle routing problems using a reactive multi-agent system

The multi-depot vehicle routing problem is a variant of the vehicle routing problem that tries to minimize the total cost of providing the service from several depots to satisfy several client demands. This paper presents a multi-ant colony system to solve the multi-depot vehicle routing problem using a reactive agent-based approach. This approach is designed to effectively solve the problem, in which each reactive agent is inspired by modeling the behavior of the ant. We define two types of reactive agents whose behavior differs in the use of two kinds of pheromone trail. In order to refer to the two phases of the execution process, i.e., the assignment phase and the routing phase, every reactive agent cooperates with others to provide a scalable solution for the overall problem. The solution of the multi-depot vehicle routing problem is beneficial and helpful for many real applications. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is done using instances from the literature, and the results obtained demonstrate good performance when compared with other approaches.