Abstract: Team orienteering problem with time windows is one of the most important logistic distribution routing opti- mization problems. The optimization objective of this problem is to plan the optimal feasible routes in which the total re- ward is maximized while a set of customers can be served in the given time windows. An improved ant colony optimiza- lion approach was developed to deal with this problem. In order to construct better and faster solutions, the proposed al- gorithm uses a fast method to determine dynamic candidate list. Moreover, it adopts the sequence method and the greedy method to construct solutions. Compared with iterated local search, the proposed algorithm can obtain better results within 12 seconds.

Key words: Heuristic algorithm, Team orienteering problem, Ant colony optimization, Time windows