A Deterministic Annealing Algorithm for a Bi-Objective Full Truckload Vehicle Routing Problem in Drayage Operations

Drayage operations involve transporting loaded and empty containers in the hinterland of a port. In this paper a full truckload vehicle routing problem in drayage operations is studied. Either the origin or destination of empty container transport requests is unknown in advance. A two-phase solution algorithm using deterministic annealing is presented to solve the bi-objective problem, minimizing the number of vehicles used and minimizing total distance travelled. Results on random problem instances show that the algorithm is able to find sets of non-dominated solutions of good quality in a small amount of computation time.