Abstract: In the classical vehicle routing problem, it considers the goods weight constraint only，but ignores other loading constraints, such as the loading space constraint. In this paper, the vehicle routing problem with threedimensional loading constraint taken into account is addressed. A heuristic is proposed for goods loading such that the three dimensional loading constraint is satisfied and optimized. Then, based on the heuristic, a simulated annealing algorithm is presented to solve the problem. A number of benchmark problems are used to test the proposed method. Results show the algorithm is effective.

Key words: three-dimensionalloading, vehicle routing problem, simulated annealing