A Novel Heuristic Based Simulated Annealing for the Capacitated Location Routing Problem

Abstract

In this paper1 we are interested to study the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP). CLRP is defined like a combination of two difficult problems the facility location problem (FLP) and the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). CLRP consists in finding the depots to be opened, the vehicle routes to be assigned to each them to serve a set of customers in condition that not exceed the capacity constraints on depots and vehicles. To solve this problem, we propose a novel two-phase heuristic to construct a feasible CLRP solutions followed by a Simulated Annealing (SA) improvement phase. Our approach uses a new customers ordering technique based on a density metrics which is the ration between demands and distances of customers to minimize CLRP costs. In order to give the effectiveness of our heuristic, several LRP instances are used. The results given by our heuristic are very encouraging.