Sequential Simulated Annealing for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

This article presents a new simulated annealing algorithm that provides very high quality solutions to the vehicle routing problem. The aim of described algorithm is to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The tests were carried out with use of some well known instances of the problem defined by M. Solomon. The empirical evidence indicates that simulated annealing can be successfully applied to bi-criterion optimization problems.