An Efficient Algorithm for Crowd Logistics Optimization

Raúl Martín-Santamaría, Ana D. López-Sánchez, María Luisa Delgado-Jalón and J. Manuel Colmenar
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Raúl Martín-Santamaría: Computer Science and Statistics Department, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Tulipán s/n, Móstoles, 28933 Madrid, Spain
Ana D. López-Sánchez: Department of Economics, Quantitative Methods and Economic History, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Ctra. de Utrera km 1, 41013 Sevilla, Spain
María Luisa Delgado-Jalón: Computer Science and Statistics Department, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Tulipán s/n, Móstoles, 28933 Madrid, Spain
J. Manuel Colmenar: Computer Science and Statistics Department, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Tulipán s/n, Móstoles, 28933 Madrid, Spain

Mathematics, 2021, vol. 9, issue 5, 1-19

Abstract: Crowd logistics is a recent trend that proposes the participation of ordinary people in the distribution process of products and goods. This idea is becoming increasingly important to both delivery and retail companies, because it allows them to reduce their delivery costs and, hence, to increase the sustainability of the company. One way to obtain these reductions is to hire external drivers who use their own vehicles to make deliveries to destinations which are close to their daily trips from work to home, for instance. This situation is modelled as the Vehicle Routing Problem with Occasional Drivers (VRPOD), which seeks to minimize the total cost incurred to perform the deliveries using vehicles belonging to the company and occasionally hiring regular citizens to make just one delivery. However, the integration of this features into the distribution system of a company requires a fast and efficient algorithm. In this paper, we propose three different implementations based on the Iterated Local Search algorithm that are able to outperform the state-of-art of this problem with regard to the quality performance. Besides, our proposal is a light-weight algorithm which can produce results in small computation times, allowing its integration into corporate information systems.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; crowd logistics; crowdshipping; occasional drivers; iterated local search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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