Track: Operations Research
Abstract
This paper deals with a traveling salesman problem that is performed daily by a Portuguese bakery company. The bakery delivers bread to multiple customers using only one vehicle and driver, leading to high costs and time consumption. The objective is to minimize total travel distance and optimize the distribution process to reduce costs. In this case, we have a typical Traveling Salesman Problem and in order to solve this problem, several solutions were first computed and compared, and then, these were used as initial solutions to a Simulated Annealing (SA) approach. The performance of the SA was tested for the real problem, with the actual company data and, an analysis of the SA behavior when started with different solutions was performed. The results obtained allowed the company to reduce its current route by more than 23%.