Pickup and Delivery Problem with Transshipment for Inland Waterway Transport

Abstract

Inland waterway transport is becoming attractive due to its minimum environmental impact in comparison with other transportation modes. Fixed timetables and routes are adopted by most barge operators, avoiding the full utilization of the available resources. Therefore a flexible model is adopted to reduce the transportation cost and environmental impacts. This paper regards the route optimization of barges as a pickup and delivery problem (PDP). A Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model is proposed to formulate the PDP with transshipment of barges, and an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) is developed to solve the problem efficiently. The approach is evaluated based on a case study in the Rhine Alpine corridor and it is shown that ALNS is able to find good solutions in reasonable computation times. The results show that the cost is lower when there is more flexibility. Moreover, the cost comparison shows that transshipment terminals can reduce the cost for barge companies.

Preference-Based Multi-Objective Optimization for Synchromodal Transport Using Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search

“…Solving the MOO problem to optimality by the exact approach often needs multiple runs for different objectives and a long computation time. In the authors’ previous work ( 12 ), Gurobi was used to solve a similar PDPT in inland waterway transport, and the results showed that it took more than 12 h when there were more than six requests. Therefore, heuristics are needed to solve MOO.…”

“…In a previous paper (12), the authors proposed an optimization model for PDPT in inland waterway transport. There are three main differences between Zhang et al (12)…”

“…The design of different operators is widely discussed in the literature (11,(36)(37)(38)(39) as well as the authors' previous paper (12). Besides traditional operators, including Greedy Insertion, Transshipment Insertion, Random Insertion, Worst Removal, and Random Removal operators, this work designs two customized operators, that is, Route Removal and Node Removal operators.…”

“…In a previous paper ( 12 ), the authors proposed an optimization model for PDPT in inland waterway transport. There are three main differences between Zhang et al ( 12 ) and this paper: (a) Zhang et al ( 12 ) only optimized the routing of barges, while this paper considers multiple modes; (b) this paper takes preferences into account, which is not considered by Zhang et al ( 12 ); (c) specific synchronization cases are presented in this paper, and they are not illustrated in Zhang et al ( 12 ).…”

“…Flow conservation constraints of both vehicles and requests are handled by Constraints ( 12)- (15). Constraint (12) represents flow conservation for vehicle flow and ( 13)-( 14) represent flow conservation for request flow. Constraint ( 13) is for transshipment terminals, and Constraint ( 14) is for regular terminals.…”