University Exam Van Routing by using ACO Metaheuristic

This paper focuses on the University exam van routing, a biggest problem during exam times for universities in India. There are so many colleges affiliated to a given university in various cities apart from each other. So, university send a number of vans for the exam paper distribution tasks. Every day before every exam university vans have to cover all the colleges while distributing the question papers as well as collecting the answer sheets from there. These vans are distributing papers to various colleges in their respective routes. It may happen that the route followed by the driver is longer than the optimal route or two vans met at the same college. And the van is also having capacity constraints. In this paper we create a simulation of conceptual world in which university is centrally localized and all the colleges are randomly placed apart from each other. The suggested procedure for solving this problem is ACO met heuristic. The main objective of this paper is to minimize the number of vans required to complete the same task and to find the best optimal route for every van. Further we reorder the nodes to create a dynamic scenario of our problem and again calculate the best optimal path using ACO approach.