Ant Colony Optimization for Retail Based Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery for Mobile Robots

Mobile Robots have been the key for automation in various applications including picking and placing items in a retail store. Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickup and Delivery (CVRP-PD) is widely used in similar applications like package delivery vehicles and mobile robots in retail, where mobile robots have a capacity limit such as weight and have to pickup and drop multiple items during their tour in an optimized manner. However, Retail application comes with more challenges where there could be multiple fixed deposit locations for particular pickup items such as packing counters and after delivering some items mobile robots can again regain capacity and be able to pickup more items during the same run. In this paper, we consider these constraints for retail applications and optimize retail orders for all mobile robots present in the environment, where the order requests for pickup and delivery of products at various locations while mobile robots have different maximum load capacities and robots can regain their capacity once they have dropped some items at their particular delivery locations. In this paper, we propose a method to solve this retail based CVRP-PD using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). We take an industrial use-case and test the method with different order sizes and robot parameters. The results have been promising and used to solve the use-case under consideration. In addition, we also evaluate the results and propose future prospects.