Comparison of meta-heuristics for container ship routing problem

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. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.