Simulated annealing-based decision support system for routing problems

The spatial character intrinsic to the routing field requires the integration of geographic information systems (GIS) and optimization approaches to handle spatial and non-spatial data in transportation applications. Motivated by the need to better support decision making in logistic area, we develop an interactive spatial decision support system (SDSS) for solving the vehicle routing problems by coupling the simulated annealing method with Quantum GIS (QGIS). In this paper, the evoked variants of VRP are detailed and formulated mathematically. The SDSS architecture is designed for the VRPs showing the interaction of GIS and SA approach according to the tight coupling strategy. A VRP variant termed the Open VRP (OVRP) is selected to show the system effectiveness. The computational performance of the SDSS for the OVRP, based on a set of benchmark instances, turned out to be effective on both computation time and solution quality.