Title: Comparison of meta-heuristics for container ship routing problem

Authors: S. Santhanakrishnan; T.T. Narendran; K. Ganesh; S.P. Anbuudayasankar

Addresses: Tata Consultancy Services, 17, Cathedral Road, Chennai - 600 086, Tamil Nadu, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai - 600 036, Tamil Nadu, India. ' Global Business Services-Global Delivery, IBM India Private Limited, Bandra East, Mumbai - 400051, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amirta Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore - 641112, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Container ship routing problem is a special variant of vehicle routing problem (VRP) which needs a lot of attention which costs enormous amount of money per day. In this paper, two popular meta-heuristics namely genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) for solving the ship routing problem have been compared. A series of experiments were conducted varying the number of ports involved and the route taken to visit these ports. These numerical experiments revealed that SA yielded more profits compared to GA as number of ports increased.

Keywords: shipping network design; empty containers; genetic algorithms; GAs; simulated annealing; metaheuristics; container shipping; ship routing; vehicle routing problem; VRP; ports.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2012.047625

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2012 Vol.12 No.3, pp.348 - 367

Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *

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