Vehicle Routing Problem Considering Reconnaissance and Transportation

Troop movement involves transporting military personnel from one location to another using available means. To minimize damage from enemies, the military simultaneously uses reconnaissance and transportation units during troop movements. This paper proposes a vehicle routing problem considering reconnaissance and transportation (VRPCRT) for wartime troop movements. The VRPCRT is formulated as a mixed-integer programming model for minimizing the completion time of wartime troop movements and reconnaissance, and transportation vehicle routes were determined simultaneously in the VRPCRT. For this paper, an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for the VRPCRT was also developed, and computational experiments were conducted to compare the ACO algorithm’s performance and that of the mixed-integer programming model. The performance of the ACO algorithm was shown to yield excellent results even for the real-size problem. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis of the change in the number of reconnaissance and transportation vehicles was performed, and the effects of each type of vehicle on troop movement were analyzed.