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Multi-trip pickup and delivery problem with time windows and synchronization

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider two-tiered city logistics systems accounting for both the inbound and outbound traffic, that have not been taken into account in models and algorithms for vehicle routing research. The problem under study, called the Multi-trip Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Synchronization, has two sets of intertwined decisions: the routing decisions which determine the sequence of customers visited by each vehicle route, the scheduling decisions which plan movements of vehicles between facilities within time synchronization restrictions. We propose a tabu search algorithm integrating multiple neighborhoods targeted to the decision sets of the problem. To assess the proposed algorithm, tests have been conducted on the first benchmark instances of the problem which have up to 72 facilities and 7200 customer demands. As no previous results are available in the literature for the problem, we also evaluate the performance of the method through comparisons with published results on two simplified problems: the Multi-zone multi-trip vehicle routing problem with separate delivery and collection, and the Vehicle routing problem with backhauls. The proposed algorithm is competitive with existing exact and meta-heuristic methods for these two problems.

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Acknowledgments

While working on this project, the first author was doctoral student with the Computer Science and Operations Research Department, Université de Montréal, and the second author was Adjuct Professor with the same department. The authors thank Professor Daniel Vigo and Dr. Andrea Bettinelli for their great kindness, cooperation and efforts to adjust their code and perform the exact-resolution part of the comparison experiments. Partial funding for this project comes from the Discovery Grant and the Discovery Accelerator Supplements Programs of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Strategic Clusters program of the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies. The authors thank the two institutions for supporting this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department d’Informatique et de Recherche pérationnelle, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Phuong Khanh Nguyen

  2. Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Réseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport (CIRRELT), Montreal, QC, Canada

    Phuong Khanh Nguyen, Teodor Gabriel Crainic & Michel Toulouse

  3. Department de Management et Technologie, ESG, U.Q.A.M, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Teodor Gabriel Crainic

  4. Faculty of Engineering, Vietnamese-German University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Michel Toulouse

Authors
  1. Phuong Khanh Nguyen
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  2. Teodor Gabriel Crainic
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  3. Michel Toulouse
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Correspondence to Teodor Gabriel Crainic.

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Nguyen, P.K., Crainic, T.G. & Toulouse, M. Multi-trip pickup and delivery problem with time windows and synchronization. Ann Oper Res 253, 899–934 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-2001-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-2001-7

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