A simulated annealing heuristic for the capacitated location routing problem

The location routing problem (LRP) is a relatively new research direction within location analysis that takes into account vehicle routing aspects. The goal of LRP is to solve a facility location problem and a vehicle routing problem simultaneously. We propose a simulated annealing (SA) based heuristic for solving the LRP. The proposed SALRP heuristic is tested on three sets of well-known benchmark instances and the results are compared with other heuristics in the literature. The computational study indicates that the proposed SALRP heuristic is competitive with other well-known algorithms.