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A covering traveling salesman problem with profit in the last mile delivery

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Abstract

This paper introduces and formulates a covering traveling salesman problem with profit arose in the last mile delivery. In this problem, a set of vertices including a central depot, customers and parcel lockers (PL) are given, and the goal is to construct a Hamiltonian cycle within a pre-defined cost over a subset of customers and/or PLs to collect maximum profits, each unvisited customer is covered by a PL in the cycle or outsourced. To solve the problem, a two-phase heuristic combined with a feasible solution construction procedure and an improvement procedure is proposed. The algorithm is evaluated on two sets of instances, and the computational results indicated its efficiency.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Chinese Education, Humanities, and Social Sciences project (Grant No. 17YJA630037).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, People’s Republic of China

    Li Jiang, Xiaoning Zang, Junfeng Dong & Changyong Liang

  2. Key Laboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision-Making, Ministry of Education, Hefei, People’s Republic of China

    Li Jiang, Xiaoning Zang, Junfeng Dong & Changyong Liang

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  1. Li Jiang
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  2. Xiaoning Zang
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Correspondence to Xiaoning Zang.

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Jiang, L., Zang, X., Dong, J. et al. A covering traveling salesman problem with profit in the last mile delivery. Optim Lett 16, 375–393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-021-01709-0

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