An improved hybrid algorithm for capacitated fixed-charge transportation problem

In this article, we consider the capacitated fixed-charge transportation problem in a two-stage supply chain network, in which the manufacturer can ship to any of the existing m distribution centres and each of the distribution centres can ship to any of the n customers aiming at minimizing the cost of the physical distribution flow. Due to the complexity of the problem, we propose an improved hybrid algorithm combining the Nearest Neighbour search heuristic with a powerful local search procedure. The extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances from the literature show that our hybrid algorithm is competitive in comparison with the known heuristics published to date.