An Ant Colony Approach to Solve a Vehicle Routing Problem in a FMCG Company

The customers for Fast Moving Consumer Goods [FMCG] are widely spread and often poses challenges for quick delivery of goods. The parameters dealing with the FMCG are logistics cost and time bound delivery of goods. Time slots are the additional constraints which are dealt with this problem. The above problem with the FMCG can be modelled as a Vehicle Routing problem with time slots. In Vehicle routing problems, the vehicle has to cover the entire routes in an optimal manner such that the vehicle visits each and every depot satisfying the customers and also meeting the capacity constraints and customer demands. We have many algorithms to solve the vehicle routing such as GA, Simulated annealing. In this paper, we have adopted ant colony algorithm to find the shortest distance between the various depots.