Multi-start Heuristics for the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we address the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem (2E-VRP ), an extension of the classical Capacitated VRP, where the delivery from a single depot to the customers is managed by routing and consolidating the freight through intermediate depots called satellites. We present a family of Multi-Start heuristics based on separating the depot-to-satellite transfer and the satellite-to-customer delivery by iteratively solving the two resulting routing subproblems, while adjusting the satellite workloads that link them. The common scheme on which all the heuristics are based consists in, after having found an initial solution, applying a local search phase, followed by a diversification; if the new obtained solutions are feasible, then local search is applied again, otherwise a feasibility search procedure is applied, and if it successful, the local search is applied on the newfound solution. Different diversification strategies and feasibility search rules are proposed. We present computational results on a wide set of instances up to 50 customers and 5 satellites and compare them with results from the literature, showing how the new methods outperform previous existent methods, both in efficiency and accuracy.

Vehicle Routing in Multi-Echelon Distribution Systems with Cross-Docking: A Systematic Lexical-Metanarrative Analysis

“…This heuristic has been used to make a satellite location analysis in order to build instances up to 250 customers, providing also a first sub-optimal solution as a reference for further, methods for the 2E-CVRP. Those results are improved by the same authors using multi-start heuristics (Crainic et al, 2011) combining local search ant tabu search algorithms. A hybrid heuristic ant colony algorithm for the same problem is proposed by Wang et al (2011).…”

Synchronizing vans and cargo bikes in a city distribution network

“…The classic two-echelon vehicle routing problem (2eVRP) was first solved by Perboli et al (2011). Since then, exact methods (Jepsen et al 2013;Baldacci et al 2013;Santos et al 2014) and heuristics (Hemmelmayr et al 2012;Crainic et al 2011b) have been proposed. In the 2eVRP studied in these papers, satellites are assumed to have (little) storage space so that temporal synchronization is not necessary.…”

“…In Crainic et al (2011a) a modeling framework for tactical planning in city logistics with uncertain demand is developed. They propose a two-stage stochastic programming formulation with recourse.…”

Multiphase Approach to Developing Model of Logistics for Coastal Tourist Destinations

“…In order to describe two-echelon vehicle model [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], let us consider a transportation carrier that has to deliver goods to a set of NC destinations, called customers. A quantity of freight qi to be delivered, called demand, is associated to each customer i.…”