The multi-vehicle profitable pickup and delivery problem

Margaretha Gansterer (), Murat Küçüktepe () and Richard F. Hartl
Additional contact information
Margaretha Gansterer: University of Vienna
Murat Küçüktepe: University of Vienna
Richard F. Hartl: University of Vienna

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, 2017, vol. 39, issue 1, No 9, 303-319

Abstract: Abstract The transportation industry expanded rapidly in a highly competitive environment. Logistics companies with insufficient volume of transport capacities are forced to make a selection of customers that they can integrate efficiently into their tours. This is of particular relevance in the pickup and delivery market, where shipments from several different customers can be moved on the same vehicle. In the literature, however, the problem of customer selection has not been applied for the given class of pickup and delivery problems so far. We want to fill this gap by introducing the multi-vehicle profitable pickup and delivery problem (MVPPDP), where multiple carriers transport goods from a selection of pickup customers to the corresponding delivery customers within given travel time limits. For this problem, we propose a method based on general variable neighborhood search (GVNS). We conduct experiments with two different variants of this method, namely a sequential (GVNSseq) and a self-adaptive (GVNSsa) version. Additionally, we compare it to an algorithm based on Guided Local Search (GLS), which is known to find good solutions for related problems very fast. The performance of these methods is examined on the basis of data instances with up to 1000 customer requests. In an experimental study, we observe that both variants of GVNS with 11 neighborhoods outperform GLS with regard to solution quality for all sizes of test instances. However, for medium sized and large instances, GLS shows an advantage in average runtimes.

Keywords: Pickup and delivery; Profitable tour problem; Metaheuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00291-016-0454-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:orspec:v:39:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s00291-016-0454-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... research/journal/291

DOI: 10.1007/s00291-016-0454-y

Access Statistics for this article

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management is currently edited by Rainer Kolisch

More articles in OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().