TY - CHAP AU - Hisafumi Kokubugata AU - Yuji Shimazaki AU - Shuichi Matsumoto AU - Hironao Kawashima AU - Tatsuru Daimon ED - Marcos de Sales Guerra Tsuzuki Y1 - 2012-08-29 PY - 2012 T1 - Improvements in Simulated Quenching Method for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows by Using Search History and Devising Means for Reducing the Number of Vehicles N2 - Simulated Annealing is a probabilistic meta-heuristic that is based on statistical mechanics: while at high temperatures molecules in a liquid move freely, the slow reduction of temperature decreases the thermal mobility of the molecules. The final state forms a pure crystal which also corresponds to a state of minimum energy. We encourage readers to explore SA in their work, mainly because it is simple and because it can yield very good results. BT - Simulated Annealing SP - Ch. 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.5772/47854 DO - 10.5772/47854 SN - PB - IntechOpen CY - Rijeka Y2 - 2024-03-28 ER -