In this paper we consider the operational planning problem of physical
distribution via a fleet of hired vehicles, for which the travelling cost is
solely a function of the sequence of locations visited within all open
delivery routes, while vehicle fixed cost is inexistent. The problem is a
special class of vehicle routing and is encountered in the literature as the
Open Vehicle Routing Problem (OVRP), since vehicles are not required to
return to the depot. The goal is to distribute in an optimal way finished
goods from a central facility to geographically dispersed customers, which
pose daily demand for items produced in the facility and act as sales points
for consumers. To solve the problem, we employ an annealing-based method
that utilizes a backtracking policy of the threshold value when no
acceptances of feasible solutions occur during the search process.
Computational results on a set of benchmark problems show that the proposed
method consistently outperforms previous algorithms for solving the OVRP.
The approach can serve as the means for effective fleet planning in
real-life problems.