A new supply chain management method with one-way time window: A hybrid PSO-SA approach

In this paper, we study a supply chain problem where a whole seller/producer distributes goods among different retailers. The proposed model of this paper is formulated as a more general and realistic form of traditional vehicle routing problem (VRP). The main advantages of the new proposed model are twofold. First, the time window does not consider any lower bound and second, it treats setup time as separate cost components. The resulted problem is solved using a hybrid of particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing (PSO-SA). The results are compared with other hybrid method, which is a combination of Ant colony and Tabu search. We use some well-known benchmark problems to compare the results of our proposed model with other method. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of this paper performs reasonably well.