A Hybrid Simulated Annealing Heuristic for Multistage Heterogeneous Fleet Scheduling with Fleet Sizing Decisions

This paper deals with multistage heterogeneous fleet scheduling with fleet sizing decisions (MHFS-FSD). This MHFS-FSD attempts to integrate vehicles allocation and fleet sizing decisions considering the vehicle routing of multiple vehicle types. The problem is formulated as mixed integer programming model. The matrix formulation denoting vehicle allocation scheme is explored according to the characteristic of this problem. Generating vehicle allocation scheme with greedy heuristic procedure (VA-GHP) as initial solution of problem is presented. The USP-IVA method to update the initial solution generated by VA-GHP approach is developed. And then, incorporating VA-GHP and USP-IVA into simulated annealing algorithm, a novel heuristic called HSAH-GHP&IVA is proposed. Finally, some experiments are designed to test the proposed heuristic and the results show that the heuristic can generate reasonably good solutions in short CPU times.