Ant Colony Algorithm Based on Magnetic Field Representation for the Travelling Salesman Problem With Time Windows

To aim at the travelling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW) , an ant colony optimization algorithm with Mutation Features based on Magnetic Field (MFM-ACOMF) was put forward.It improved the heuristic function in the traditional ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, to meet the time requirement of customers and reduce the probability of getting a local optimal.Moreover, when it obtained the preliminary solution after all the iterations, a mutation strategy was used to optimize the customer nodes that did not reach the time window limit.The simulation results show that the MFM-ACOMF algorithm has certain improvement on both the optimal solution quality and customer satisfaction, compared with the ACO algorithm.