Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) using reliable protocols of routing have become crucial in identifying the changes to topology on a continuous basis for a large collection of vehicles. For this purpose, it becomes important to identify an optimal configuration of these protocols. There are several possible configurations that have been preventing the configuration of efficient protocols that do not make use of automatic and intelligent design tools. It can further motivate using the techniques of metaheuristics like the tools, which are well‐suited to be able to solve these problems. The glowworm swarm optimization (GSO), simulated annealing (SA), and slow heat‐based SA‐GSO algorithms have been proposed in this work. The SA is a method of optimization, which imitates the manner in which the thermal system has been frozen down to its lowest state of energy. In the GSO, there is guidance to the rules of feasibility, where the swarm converges to its feasible regions very fast. Additionally, for overcoming any premature convergence, there is a local search strategy that is based on the SA and is used for making a search that is near to its true optimum solutions. Finally, this sluggish temperature‐based SA‐GSO algorithm will be employed to solve routing problems and problems of heat transfer. There is a hybrid slow heat SA‐GSO algorithm with a faster speed of convergence and higher precision of computation that is more effective in solving problems of constrained engineering.