Solving container loading problem with simulated annealing algorithm

Abstract

In the economic world, transportation is very important and decreasing transportation cost is a challenging issue. To decrease this cost, increasing the efficiency of loading containers is very important, and this problem mainly named as Container Loading Problem(CLP). There are many researches about CLP with different type of approaches. In the literature, solutions are generally lined up as Heuristic and Meta-Heuristic approaches. Simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is a meta-heuristic approach. The most important advantage of SA is avoiding from local optimums. In this paper, a single CLP is solved by using simulated annealing algorithm. Proposed system algorithm and experimental results are presented. These results showed that SA is an acceptable solution approach for CLP type problems.