A Simulated Annealing and Nearest Neighborhood Approach to Solve a Vehicle Routing Problem in a FMCG Company

Recently, there are certain category of supply chains which are fast emerging such as online groceries, fast moving goods which are low in cost and fast moving. The logistics cost of these supply chains is very important and they need to be delivered in the shortest possible time. All these problems are categorized into a vehicle routing problem. In certain problem, additional constraints such as time slots are also introduced so as to deliver the goods in particular time. Thus, it becomes very important to make the vehicle scheduling efficient. It becomes Non Polynomial when there is more than one vehicle in the delivery system. A vehicle routing problem is defined as a system of a vehicle covering a geographically dispersed routes which are covered in the shortest possible time. The vehicle should not visit any of the routes twice. In this paper, we have used simulated annealing and nearest neighborhood algorithms to compare and solve a designated set of routes in which a FMCG company delivers the goods to its customer.