The vehicle routing problem with transfers

IF 4.1 2区工程技术 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS

Computers & Operations Research Pub Date : 2025-01-27 DOI:10.1016/j.cor.2025.106980

Maichel M. Aguayo , Francisco N. Avilés , Subhash C. Sarin , Claudia Archetti

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

In the vehicle routing problem (VRP), a fleet of capacitated vehicles serves a set of customers with known demands at minimum cost. The Split Delivery VRP (SDVRP), a variant of VRP, permits customer demands to be served by different vehicles, and thereby results in a significant cost reduction. In this paper, we study the VRP with transfers (VRP-T), where, as in the SDVRP, customers can be visited by multiple vehicles. However, differently from the SDVRP, customer locations can be used as transfer locations to exchange load among vehicles. We find that the routing costs can potentially be reduced by at most 50% by allowing such transfers in the VRP. We develop a two-index mixed-integer programming (MIP) model and heuristic algorithm based on

Multi − start local search (MSLS)

. The solutions obtained by the

MSLS

are used as warm-start for the MIP and the corresponding approach is tested. Computational results indicate substantial savings in the costs incurred and the number of vehicles required when transfers are allowed. Results also suggest that transfers are at least as effective in reducing the cost as split delivery.

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来源期刊

Computers & Operations Research 工程技术-工程：工业

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

8.70%

发文量

292

审稿时长

8.5 months

期刊介绍： Operations research and computers meet in a large number of scientific fields, many of which are of vital current concern to our troubled society. These include, among others, ecology, transportation, safety, reliability, urban planning, economics, inventory control, investment strategy and logistics (including reverse logistics). Computers & Operations Research provides an international forum for the application of computers and operations research techniques to problems in these and related fields.