Automated Map Generation for an Intelligent Routing System

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a combinatorial optimization and integer programming problem seeking to service a number of customers with a fleet of vehicles. VRP is an important problem in the fields of transportation, distribution and logistics. Often the context is that of delivering goods located at a central depot to customers who have placed orders for such goods. Implicit is the goal of minimizing the cost of distributing the goods. Many methods have been developed for searching for good solutions to the problem, but for all but the smallest problems, finding global minimum for the cost function is computationally complex. This paper aims at providing a real time solution to the travelling salesman problem based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm.