A hybrid simulated annealing and column generation approach for capacitated multicommodity network design

This paper presents a hybrid simulated annealing (SA) and column generation (CG) algorithm for the path‐based formulation of the capacitated multicommodity network design (PCMND) problem. In the proposed method, the SA metaheuristic algorithm manages open and closed arcs. Several strategies for adding and dropping arcs are suggested and evaluated. For a given design vector in the proposed hybrid approach, the PCMND problem becomes a capacitated multicommodity minimum cost flow (CMCF) problem. The exact evaluation of the CMCF problem is performed using the CG algorithm. The parameter tuning is done by means of design of experiments approach. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by solving several benchmark instances. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the solutions of CPLEX solver and the best‐known method in the literature under different time limits. Statistical analysis proves that the proposed algorithm is able to obtain better solutions.