Ant colony optimization techniques for the hamiltonian p-median problem

Location-Routing problems involve locating a number of facilitiesamong candidate sites and establishing delivery routes to a set of users in such a way that the total system cost is minimized. A special case of these problems is Hamiltonian p-Median problem (HpMP). This research applies the metaheuristic method of ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the HpMP. Modifications are made to the ACO algorithm used to solve the traditional vehicle routing problem (VRP) in order to allow the search of the optimal solution of the HpMP. Regarding this metaheuristic algorithm a computational experiment is reported as well.