Max Min Ant System and Capacitated p-Medians: Extensions and Improved Solutions

This work introduces a modified MAX MIN Ant System (MMAS) designed to solve the Capacitated pMedians Problem (CPMP). It presents the most relevant steps towards the implementation of an MMAS to solve the CPMP, including some improvements on the original MMAS algorithm, such as the use of a density model in the information heuristics and a local search adapted from the uncapacitated pmedians problem. Extensions of a recently proposed updating rule for the pheromone level, aiming at improving the MMAS ability to deal with large-scale instances, are also presented and discussed. Some simulations are performed using instances available from the literature, and well-known heuristics are employed for benchmarking. Povzetek: Predstavljene so izboljšave algoritma MAX MIN na osnovi kolonij mravelj za reševanje problema CPMP.