A large neighborhood search approach to the vehicle routing problem with delivery options

Abstract

To reduce delivery failures in last mile delivery, several types of delivery options have been proposed in the past twenty years. Still, customer satisfaction is a challenge because a single location is chosen independently of the time at which customers will be delivered. In addition, delivery in shared locations such as lockers and shops also experience failure due to capacity or opening-time issues at the moment of delivery. To address this issue and foster consolidation in shared delivery points, we investigate the case where a customer can specify several delivery options together with preference levels and time windows. We define, in this article, the Vehicle Routing Problem with Delivery Options, which integrates several types of delivery locations. It consists of designing a set of routes for a fleet of vehicles that deliver to each customer at one of his/her options during the corresponding time window. These routes should respect capacities at shared locations such as lockers and minimum service level requirements, while minimizing the total routing costs. To solve this problem, we have designed a large neighborhood search in which a set partitioning problem is solved to regularly reassemble routes. Specific ruin and recreate operators are proposed and combined with numerous operators from the literature. A thorough experimental study was carried out to determine a subset of efficient and complementary operators. The proposed method outperforms existing algorithms from the literature on particular cases of the problem under consideration, such as the vehicle routing problem with roaming delivery locations and the vehicle routing problem with home and roaming delivery locations. New instances are generated and used both to serve as a benchmark and to propose some managerial insight into the vehicle routing problem with alternative delivery options.

Last mile deliveries with lockers: formulations and algorithms

“…The authors model the problem with MILP formulations and present a Savings based heuristic to solve a real-world instance with 12 customers. Dumez et al [4] present the vehicle routing problem with delivery options, a VRP with time windows in which several delivery options such as home, work place, locker, or car trunk are considered. The customers define their delivery preferences by ordering the options.…”

Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for Vehicle Routing Problems with Transshipment Facilities Arising in City Logistics

“…In their heuristics solution method, customer requests are assigned to routes based on a set of rules, and subsequently, a traveling salesman problem is solved for each of these routes. Dumez et al (2021a) also focus on different delivery locations for customers and recently introduced the vehicle routing problem with delivery options (VRPDO). In this problem, each customer can specify a number of delivery options along with a preference value.…”

“…Zhou et al (2018) consider a two-echelon vehicle routing problem (2E-VRP), where deliveries are routed through an intermediate capacitated satellite depot. Similar to Dumez et al (2021a) and Sitek and Wikarek (2019), they assume that customers can provide different delivery options, such as receiving their parcels at their home or picking them up at an intermediate pick up facility. To solve this problem, Zhou et al (2018) propose a hybrid multi-population genetic algorithm that is tested on real-world and artificial instances.…”

“…In order to solve both the VRPRDL and VRPHRDL, Ozbaygin et al (2017) developed a branch-and-price algorithm. Later, Dumez et al (2021a), Dumez et al (2021b), as well as Tilk et al (2020) also study both problems to validate their algorithms for the VRPDO, leading to new best solutions and large time improvements on the instances of Ozbaygin et al (2017) and Reyes et al (2017).…”

Optimization of the Milk-run route for inbound logistics of auto parts under low-carbon economy

“…Scholars have conducted extensive research on it from different perspectives since the first proposition of this issue was put by Dantizg and Rams in 1959. 1 These scholars are Gutierrez et al, 2 Errico et al, 3 Xuping et al, 4 Yaming et al, 5 Sacramento et al, 6 Belgin et al, 7 Fink et al, 8 Li et al, 9 Xue et al, 10 Timo, 11 Wang et al, 12 Hoogeboom et al 13 Rostami et al, 14 Uit het Broek et al, 15 Hoogeboom et al, 13 Dumez et al, 16 Zhang et al, 17 Pessoa et al, 18 and so on. However, most of these studies consider how to reduce the total cost of distribution from the view of economy.…”