Vehicle selection for a multi-compartment vehicle routing problem

Manuel Ostermeier and Alexander Hübner

European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 269, issue 2, 682-694

Abstract: This paper addresses the vehicle routing and selection problem of single and multi-compartment vehicles for grocery distribution. Retailers used to rely on single-compartment vehicles (SCV), and transported only one temperature-specific product segment with this vehicle type. Retailers now have the option of using multi-compartment vehicles (MCV) due to technological advances. Products requiring differing temperature zones can be transported jointly as the loading area is split into separate compartments. Both vehicle types cause different costs for loading, transportation and unloading. In literature either the use of SCVs or MCVs has been considered without a distinction between vehicle-dependent costs and the use of both vehicle types in the fleet to achieve a cost-optimal fleet mix. We therefore identify vehicle-dependent costs within empirical data collection and present an extended multi-compartment vehicle routing problem (MCVRP) for the vehicle selection. We solve the problem with a Large Neighborhood Search. Our numerical experiments are based on the insights we draw from a real-life case with a retailer. In further experiments we show that the mixed fleet is always better than an exclusive fleet of SCVs or MCVs and state which factors influence the cost reduction. A mixed fleet can reduce costs by up to 30%. As a result, mixed fleets are advisable in grocery distribution and vehicle selection should be part of the MCVRP.

Keywords: Food retailing; Multi-temperature logistics; Vehicle routing; Large neighborhood search; Multi- vs. single- commodity distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171830095X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:269:y:2018:i:2:p:682-694

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.01.059

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().