This paper presents a simplified version of the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm together with the cluster-first route-second heuristic for the vehicle routing problem. This version of SA uses fewer and less cryptic parameters in its annealing schedule. The best results of the simplified algorithm were equal or superior to any published results to date. Several conditioning strategies were attempted to improve the statistical quality of the SA results and these were: staged cooling, constraint relaxation, and tabu list. The staged cooling proved to show the greatest promise. The algorithm is very simple and provides a robust solution method to the VRP. Furthermore, there is evidence that the simple algorithm can be improved upon by applying additional strategies to various aspects of the problem.
