A HYBRID SIMULATED ANNEALING ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING MULTI-OBJECTIVE CONTAINER-LOADING PROBLEMS

摘要

In this article, we explored a new approach to solution of multi-objective container-loading problems mostly encountered in transportation and wholesaling industries. Our goal is to load the items (boxes) that would provide the highest total weight to the container in the best possible way. These two objectives (weight maximization and volume utilization) are conflicting because the volume of a box is usually not proportional to its weight. A weighted goal programming model is formulated and presented. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm accompanied by a heuristic filling procedure is then proposed to solve the model. The proposed algorithm has been first tested on a set of benchmark problems available in the literature and then used for real-world data provided by a distribution company. The computational results have validated significance and usefulness of the proposed approach.