IMPROVEMENT HEURISTICS FOR THE VEHICLE-ROUTING PROBLEM-BASED ON SIMULATED ANNEALING

This paper reports on the use of simulated annealing-based improvement methods for the Vehicle Routing Problem. The improvement methods considered are aimed at relocating and/or exchanging stops or strings of stops between different routes, starting from an initial feasible solution. The simulated annealing-based improvement methods are compared against their descent alternatives as well as other metaheuristics implementations on a set of classical test problems. The results are reported.