Solving hybrid-vehicle routing problem using modified simulated annealing

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the hybrid vehicle routing problem (HVRP) at which the vehicle consumes two types of power: fuel and electricity. The aim of this problem is to minimize the total cost of travelling between customers, provided that each customer is visited only once. The vehicle departs from the depot and returns after completing the whole route. This optimization problem is solved using a modified simulated annealing (SA) heuristic procedure with constant temperature. This approach is implemented on a numerical example and the results are compared with the SA algorithm with decreasing temperature. The obtained results show that using the SA with constant temperature overrides the SA with decreasing temperature. The results indicate that SA with decreasing temperature needs twice the number of iterations needed by the SA with constant temperature to reach a near optimum solution.