Simulated Annealing Based Vehicle Routing Planning for Freight Container Transportation

This paper addresses vehicle routing planning in freight container transportation systems where a number of loaded containers are to be delivered to their destination places. The system under consideration is static in that all transportation requirements are predetermined at the beginning of a planning horizon. A two-phased procedure is presented for freight container transportation. In the first phase, the optimal model is presented to determine optimal total time to perform given transportation requirements and the minimum of number of vehicles required. Based on the results from the optimal model, in the second phase, ASA(Accelerated Simulated Annealing) algorithm is presented to perform all transportation requirements with the least number of vehicles by improving initial vehicle routing planning constructed by greedy method. It is found that ASA algorithm has an excellent global searching ability through various experiments in comparison with existing methods