Copyright © 2013 Jianhua Ma and Guohua Sun. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The objective of vehicle routing problem is usually to minimize the total traveling distance or cost. But in practice, there are a lot of problems needed to minimize the fastest completion time. The milk-run vehicle routing problem (MRVRP) is widely used in milk-run distribution. The mutation ACO is given to solve MRVRP with fastest completion time in this paper. The milk-run VRP with fastest completion time is introduced first, and then the customer division method based on dynamic optimization and split algorithm is given to transform this problem into finding the optimal customer order. At last the mutation ACO is given and the numerical examples verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.