As discussed in Section 3, the total cost is determined by three groups of decisions:
route selection, speed and temperature of each stage. Therefore, it is impossible to
derive an optimal solution by using mathematical optimization algorithm. Instead, we
need to use heuristic optimization algorithm, which helps get an approximate solution
for the complex problem. The fuzzy guided GA approach is adopted to illustrate the
practical application of the proposed total cost model. GA is an optimization technique
of parallel computing. Unlike other algorithms that work on a single solution, GA