The Two-Echelon Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem: Models and Math-Based Heuristics

Abstract

M ultiechelon distribution systems are quite common in supply-chain and logistics. They are used by public administrations in their transportation and traffic planning strategies, as well as by companies, to model own distribution systems. In the literature, most of the studies address issues relating to the movement of flows throughout the system from their origins to their final destinations. Another recent trend is to focus on the management of the vehicle fleets required to provide transportation among different echelons. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it introduces the family of two-echelon vehicle routing problems (VRPs), a term that broadly covers such settings, where the delivery from one or more depots to customers is managed by routing and consolidating freight through intermediate depots. Second, it considers in detail the basic version of two-echelon VRPs, the two-echelon capacitated VRP, which is an extension of the classical VRP in which the delivery is compulsorily delivered through intermediate depots, named satellites. A mathematical model for two-echelon capacitated VRP, some valid inequalities, and two math-heuristics based on the model are presented. Computational results of up to 50 customers and four satellites show the effectiveness of the methods developed.

Modeling and Optimization of Multi-echelon Transportation systems - a hybrid approach

“…with known ordered demands, minimizing the total delivery cost in the fulfillment of vehicle capacity constraints. Multi-echelon systems presented in the literature such as 2E-CVRP usually explicitly consider the routing problem at the last level of the transportation system, while a simplified routing problem is considered at higher levels [4,15].…”

“…The formal mathematical model for 2E-CVRP in the form of MILP was taken from [4]. Table I shows the parameters and decision variables of the model.…”

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.…”

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.…”