Reducing Traveled Distance in the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows using a Multi-Start Simulated Annealing

Vehicle routing problems have been extensively analyzed to reduce transportation costs of people and goods. More particularly, the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) imposes the period of time of customer availability as a constraint, a very common characteristic in real world picking up and delivery problems. Using minimization of the total distance as the main objective to be fulfilled, this work implements an efficient hybrid system which associates a non-monotonic Simulated Annealing technique to a Hill Climbing Strategy with Random Restart. The algorithm performance is evaluated by comparing the results achieved with the proposed algorithm with the best published works found in the literature of the 56 Solomon instances.