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Improved Ant Colony System for the VRPSPDTW: the case of logistic transport
related to event organization

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 Improved Ant Colony System for the VRPSPDTW: the case of logistic
transport related to event organization

L. Boubahri, S.-A. Addouche, A. El Mhamedi

MGSI - IUT de Montreuil – Université Paris 8
140, rue de la Nouvelle France-93100 Montreuil Cedex
l.boubahri@iut.univ-paris8.fr ; addouche@iut.univ-paris8.fr ; a.elmhamedi@iut.univ-paris8.fr

Abstract delivery groups in the bus have to be unseated in their

In this paper, we present an Improved Ant Colony
System (ACS) for the VRPSPDTW (Vehicle Routing
Problem with Simultaneous Pick-up and Delivery with
Time Windows). We submit adaptations and additions
to the different solutions for VRPSPDTW that based
research works of Gajpal and Abad [8], [9]. The real
treated problem is to minimize the number of bus fleet
that have to serve several schools (stations) for pick-up
and delivery of different groups of students at different
time windows. In detail, this problem is particularly
complex. The significant improvement is to take into
account the individual time windows, the time of
service in each station and the preference function
related to operation type at each served station.
1. Introduction
The scheduling takes a major concern in many areas
such as Product conception, Time tabling, Supply
Chain Management… The problem here is to organize
an event with consisting of multi-topic conferences
destined for all schools situated in north-east suburbs
of Paris. Each school can send several groups at
different time windows. Every group is assigned to at
least one conference accordingly to a related slot. This
event held in a few days but requires a fastidious effort
of organization and scheduling. In this paper we will
focus in the transport logistics problem. The problem
can be described as follows: Given a single depot
which represent the place where held the organization
of the event, a set of student groups has to be delivery
and pick-up at from its respective stations for given
time windows. Each group must be served by only one
bus for the delivered and the only one bus for the pick-
up. We suppose that we dispose of a homogenous fleet
of buses with the same capacity. Each bus must return
to the depot if it can’t pick up other groups due to the
available capacity or time windows constraint. But, all
respectively school.
We adopt Gajpal and Abad [8], [9] approach by
dividing this into two sub-problems: assigning group to
the vehicles and assigning routes to vehicles with the
objective of minimizing their number of the buses
used. However, our problem presented special issues:
each bus can pick-up and deliver group in the same
station in the same tour. Before serving each station,
the bus must consider two constraints: capacity
constraint and time window. The first is due to the
limited capacity of each bus and the second is due to
the constraint that every group must arrive in the depot
before a specific dead time related to the selected
conference. The number of bus available is not fixed
due to the purpose of minimizing the number of bus
required. This problem is known in the literature as
VRPSPDTW.
2. Literature review
Tao and al. Classifies the vehicle routing problem
(VRP) in the areas of reverse logistics into three types
[16]. The first is the Vehicle Routing Problem with
backhauls (VRPB), in which the pick- up is permitted
only after all deliveries. The second type is Mixed
Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPBM),
which allows the pick-up to be performed before the
last delivery. The last type is the Vehicle Routing
Problem with Simultaneous Pick-up and Delivery
(VRPSPD). Min have introduced the VRPSDP to solve
a real life problem of transporting books between
libraries [13]. To solve this problem, he adopts the
heuristic “cluster first and route second”.
The purpose of this paper is to use this method and
enhance it by integrating time windows and capacity
considerations. Plus to this, we given formulation of
many daemon actions like operation preferences (pick-

1
up and/or Delivery), group size, service time (related to
this size), etc. For this aims, we focused in the
literature papers dealing with this specific problem.
Lao and Liang [10] present a two-phase method for the
multiple-vehicle PDPTW (pickup and delivery
problem with time windows). In the first phase, new
hybrid heuristic that is based on a standard insertion
procedure and sweep procedure is applied to construct
the initial solution. In the second phase, a tabu search
method is proposed to improve the solution. But a few
paper deals with the VRPSDP. This former was
introduced by Min [13] to solve a real life problem of
transporting books between libraries. Nagy [15] solved
VRSPD using the insertion based heuristic that they
designed for the VRPBM (vehicle Routing Problem
with backhauls). Recently a number of authors have
proposed metaheuristic to solve VRPSPD [1],[15].
Recently, Gajpal and Abad [8],[9] have focused in the
VRPSPD. They proposed an ant colony system
approach to solve this problem. However, no one of
these papers has treated the various constraints related
to the resolution of our problem instead of (time
consuming constraint, capacity restriction,
simultaneous pickup and delivery…). But, we have
find in the work of Gajpal and Abad the most relevant
approach able to be adaptive for our problem. Here we
will give a detail descript for their approach.
Gajpal and Abad [8], [9] have focused in an optimize
approach to deal with the scheduling and the
assignment of a fleet of identical vehicles located at the
depot to be used to serve customers distributed
geographically in the area. The capacity of each
vehicle is restricted. A customer requires a given
shipment to be delivered and another load to be picked-
up during the single visit of a vehicle. The objective is
to design a set of minimum cost routes to serve all
customers. The constraint is that the cumulated load on
a vehicle has to be continuously under vehicle capacity
level.
They used a multi-ant approach inspired by “cluster
first and route second” procedure of VRP and they
proposed the saving heuristic. They propose two types
of ants to minimize these two different objective
functions: the first type of ant assigns customers to
vehicles while the second one is used to construct a
route for a vehicle that has to serve its assigned
customers. In order to improve the quality of the
solution generated, they used a three local search
which are: 2-opt search scheme, customer
insertion/interchange multi-route scheme and the sub
path exchange multi-route scheme. They don’t
consider different time windows for each customer.
Other formulation limitations are presented bellow.
2
Indeed, they taken into account the cumulated capacity
and distances in routes.
Our problem consisting in scheduling of bus fleet
that have to serve several distributed schools and
delivery and pick-up different groups of students with
different sizes. Those groups must arrived at the
conference base with different dead times (related to
their chosen conferences). In the given bus that takes
many of these groups, there are other groups that must
deliver to their schools situated in the way.
Consequently, we resumed Gajpal and Abad work and
added many actions:
• Integrate time windows constraint related to all
groups considered in a given route.
• Consider the size of groups to calculate service
time (time of delivery and pick-up in a school)
• Use this size to construct route and encourage the
backhaul without requiring.
• Use type of operation (pick-up, delivery or both)
to focus on a school during route construction.
For vocabulary, the customers are the group station
(schools) and the vehicles are the buses.
Concerning formulation limitations, they are related
to calculation of random-proportional rule. Firstly,
the dummy visibility is only function of the available
capacity. The trail intensity is the inverse of an
objective function of initial-tour length. This
formulation is not opportune for our problem. So we
have chosen to calculate the trail intensities
accordingly to the spatial density of the set of stations
that affected to the vehicle (equation 1). We proposed a
dummy visibility depends to available capacity (at each
step), the type of the station (delivered, picked-up or
the two operation) and to the number of students that
have to be taken and delivered (equation 2).
For the second problem Gajpal and Abad [8],[9]
chooses the saving value heuristic which depends
exclusively on distances between customers. To be
more pertinent with our problem optimization, we have
introduced the time consuming for the attractiveness
and available capacity, the time consuming for the
travelling and the time servicing for every selected
station (equation 4).For the trail intensities we have use
the same formulation as used by [8], [9]( equation 3).
3. Time Windows consideration
The presences of diversified circumstances of traffic:
like availability of the vehicle, time consuming, tour
length…. at different times of the day were first taken
into account by Malandraki and Daskin in [12]. On
each arc a stepfunction distribution of the travel time
was introduced. A mixed integer programming
approach and a nearest neighbor heuristic were used in
the optimization. Another approach to the time
dependent VRP is presented by Ichoua et al. in [11],
where the customers are characterized by soft time
windows, that is, if the arrival time at a customer is
later than the end of the time window, the cost function
(the total travel time here) will be penalized by some
amount. The optimization is done with a tabu search
heuristic, and it is based on the use of an
approximation function to evaluate in constant time the
goodness of local search moves. Donati and al [5]
shown that in the VRP where is only one depot in the
model formulation, before starting the computation of
a new tours, a set of n customers is created, where n is
the number of tours lefts to complete. Generaly in this
case of problem each arc is an oriented and similarly
for their travel time distribution. For our problem, as
mentioned in Gambardella and al [7] the ACO can be
adaptive for the VRP with hard time windows
constraints (VRPTW).The difficulties in our problem
that each bus have a restrictive time windows to leave
time (T , that impose for each bus must require a
the base and to come back. The first, is the tardiness
condition is the time T is inferior to the travel time
sufficient condition to serve each station. This
k, T t 
T  , Which T  is the time that each
from each station served to the base.
bus must leave the base, and T is the tardiness
respective station and t  is the travel time between the
deadline that a picked-up group must leave her
station i and the base.
groups time that T is the earlier deadline that
The second, is the earlier deadline that pick-up
station (depot) k, T
T t  t 
picked-up groups of students must arrived at base
ω. π , ,  Ω′  , i is visited after j, ω represents the
student and π represent the total size of the delivered
service time for the delivery or the pick-up of one
 is the arrival date at the station j and  is the
and picked-up groups of the station i.
traveling time from j to i.  is the return time from
station i.
4. Proposed ACS
In recent years, several authors have applied ACS
metaheuristic to vehicle routing problems. ACS was
aimed to solve the VRP, in which the goal is to find
generally the shortest round-trip to link a series of
cities. The general algorithm is relatively simple and
based on a set of ants, each making one of the possible
round-trips along the cities. To each edge between
couple of towns are associated two weights: a
desirability measure τ (i,j), called the amount of
pheromone or trail intensity, which is modified at each
3
run by artificial ants, and a cost η(i,j), assuming value
equal to the reciprocal of the length of the edge. If the
graph considered is not oriented τ (i,j)=τ (j,i), for each
couple (i,j) of nodes.
At the beginning f ants are located in the depot.
Each ant generates a complete tour by choosing the
nodes according to a probabilistic transition rule. Ants
prefer to move to nodes connected by shortest edges
with high amount of pheromone. When the ants move
the level of pheromone on the edges used is modified
(local updating rule). Once all the ants have completed
their tours a global pheromone updating rule is applied.
Then the whole process is repeated. The advantage of
the ACS is related to some aspect exclusively for the
ACS by the daemon action as cited by Mullen and al.
[14] Depending on the problem to be solved, daemon
actions may be introduced into the algorithm. Daemon
actions influence the guidance of the ants during
algorithm runtime and can be used in order to speed up
convergence. As an example of daemon action may be
adding extra pheromone to the best solution trail so
fast, at the end of each iteration.
For an introduction to the ACS approach see Dorigo
[4], Bullenheimer [2] and Eksioglu and al [6]. Also,
Cheng and Mao [3] propose a classification of ant
colony optimization. To get an idea in the adaptation of
the (ACS) to the time windows constraint see
Gambardella et al [7] and Donati and al [5].
4.1. The trail intensities and re-initialization
The trail intensities are initialized using an initial
solution, which is produced using a low phase
procedure. In the first phase, groups are arbitrarily
assigned one by one to vehicle (bus) ignoring the
capacity restriction. In the second phase, a route is
constructed for each bus by iteratively adding the
assigned group.
The trail intensities of a bus-ant 1 , represents the
Two types of ants are used: bus-ants and route ants.
The trail intensities of a route-ant 2 , is the intensity
intensity that the station i being served by vehicle k.
of visiting station i by the bus k. In the algorithm, trail
intensities are reinitialized five times according to
choice of [8]and [9]
4.2. Generation of a solution by an ant
4.2.1. Assigning Schools to bus. In first phase,
classically, an artificial ant constructs a complete tour
by successively visiting all schools (we named station).
In our example, a station i that is not yet assigned to a
bus k, is randomly chosen. This remove the station i
from the set of schools Ω. Initially, Ω = {1, 2, 3… n}
and Ω′  !. This represents the set of stations
ξ = $2 )Z9 $, )[9
In second phase, let " be the set of available bus. A
assigned to bus k; with availability of v buses.

bus is available for assigning the station i if the ξ , 2 and , are respectively the attractiveness,
available capacity is more or equal to the size of the the trail intensity and the dummy visibility. :9 and ;2
groups to be pick-up from this. Note that if we operate reflect the relative influence of trail intensity and the
simultaneous pickup and delivery at the given station,
2
attractiveness.
we have to delivery first and pick-up after. &
](
(equation 4)
a) , , & , 9 ( equation 3)
We use the following random proportional rule for
choosing the bus to serve group i

$%&'( )*+ $,-' ).+

# if bus k 0 ψ
∑(0 ψ $%&'( )*+ $,-' ).+ , & <=>L0, $T N T N t  N t  N ω. π )θ^ W
Where:

_`a is the earlier deadline that picked-up groups

∑ 1
Where:
of students must arrived at base station (depot).  is
a) 1
- 4 Ω′ ( ,'5- 23
671 Ω (  8& the arrival date at the station j and  is the traveling
′ ( equation 1)
b) , = , & , 9 ( equation 2) time from j to i,  is the return time from station i

pick-up of one student, π represent the total size of the

and ω represents the service time for the delivery or the
:& and ;1 reflect the relative influence of trail
intensity and attractiveness. We choose to calculate the delivered and picked-up groups of the station i. , 9 is

, is considered as an attractiveness since it

trail intensities accordingly to the spatial density of all the same parameter as in the first algorithm.
stations affected to each bus divided by the number of
station. insures that a high probability is given to a bus that has
The attractiveness is obtained from two parameters: a high available capacity, time windows respected and
which focus on station with delivery or simultaneous
∑5 D Ω′( ∆C  ∆C +
J pick-up and delivery service.
, &
<=> ?0, A I K
card Ω′  1
The following random proportion rule used to select
the next station i to visit immediately after station j.
, 9 L0, $M N M N nb )JQ $type )UJV W
ξji
for i0 Ωk
Where nb is the difference between the size of the b ?∑l0 Ω ξjl
delivered groups (∆C 8 ) and the size of those are 0 otherwise
picked-up (∆C U ) at in the station i. ∆C ∆C 8 N
∆C U . type 2 if in the station i will occur just a This process is continued until all affected stations are
pick-up, type 1 if in the station will concern
inserted in the route of bus k. This algorithm is applied
delivery or a simultaneous delivery and pick-up. M
for all buses.
(respectivelyM ) is the effective capacity of the bus
when station j (respectively j) is served. X& , X9 and 5. Three heuristics for local search
XY are weighting coefficients. X9 is an odd number to
After the construction of a solution by an ant, the
solution is improved by local search. Here, we keep the
, & support the selection of stations that reduce
safeguard sign of the related term.
same heuristic system used by Gajpal and Abad [8],
[9]. In fact, three types of local search schemes are
than pick-up). , 9 avoids the excess capacity of bus.
effective capacity of the bus (more delivered students
used including two multi-route schemes. We use 2-opt
local search to improve the solution generated. Other
two local search schemes are the customer
4.2.2. Construction of routes for individual vehicles: insertion/interchange multi- route scheme band the sub
Once groups are assigned to bus, a route is constructed path exchange multi-route scheme. Here, it’s relevant
for each bus vehicle by solving the underlying to mentioned that each solution or a set of solution
traveling salesman problem. The ant starts from the
windows. Which mentioned that T T N t  N
(subpath) to be improvement have to satisfy the time
depot and successively builds the solution by choosing
t  N ω. π T .
the next station. The attractiveness value of visiting
station i immediately after station j is:

4
 For the process of updating elitist ants and updating
trail intensities, we have choose the same formulation
as uses by [8] and [9].
6. Conclusion and perspective
In this paper we have proposed a promising
approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem with
Simultaneous Pick-up and delivery (VEPSPD). This
Ant System approach is based on the work of Gajpal
and Abad [8],[9]]. However we have proposed an
improved formulation for the trail intensities and the
attractive to deal with others aspects for this problem
like available capacity, the types of the station, the time
constraint and servicing time in each station. In the
next paper we will propose to make a simulation for
our approach and we will compare this result with the
result find by Gajpal and Abad [8],[9]].
7. References
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