Why do delivery trucks avoid left turns? Teaching ant colony optimization to plan routes with fewer left turns (Part 2)

Ant Colony Optimization for the Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) in Python: cost functions and turn penalties

The Ant Colony Optimization series

• 01 | Ants don’t have Google Maps. So how do they find the shortest path?
• 02 | Even ants get lost together: tune ACO’s α, β, and ρ with one cheat sheet
• 03 | Are ants really better (Part 1) — ACO, GA, SA, and PSO run head-to-head on one problem: what a fair fight looks like before your thesis defense
• 04 | Are ants really better (Part 2) — Results from 10 real runs each, how to choose, and why the most popular one, PSO, came last
• 05 | A truck can’t carry it all? Planning delivery routes with ant colony optimization (Part 1)
• 06 | Why do delivery trucks avoid left turns? Teaching ant colony optimization to plan routes with fewer left turns (Part 2) (this article)
• 07 | How does a robot vacuum clean the whole home and get back to its dock? Planning obstacle-avoiding, full-coverage routes with ACO (Part 1)
• 08 | ACO doesn’t just find a shorter route; it makes the robot vacuum move faster too (Part 2)
• 09 | Ants, genes, annealing or particles: who cleans best? ACO, GA, SA and PSO plan…