A Well-Arranged Simulated Annealing Approach for the Location-Routing Problem with Time Windows

Location and route planning are implemented independently in most distribution networks. Low-quality solutions are obtained if sequential methods, e.g. locate depots first and plan routes second, are used. In this paper we include aspects of route planning in location planning and consider it as a location-routing problem (LRP). Here, we present a well-arranged simulated annealing approach for a single-stage LRP with time windows and compare its performance with a sequential and a tabu search heuristic. Although the presented approach improves the costs of the tabu search approach slightly the computational time is reduced significantly.