A Study of Community Group Purchasing Vehicle Routing Problems Considering Service Time Windows

Wei Song, Shuailei Yuan, Yun Yang and Chufeng He
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Wei Song: School of Marxism, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
Shuailei Yuan: School of Economics and Management, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
Yun Yang: School of Economics and Management, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
Chufeng He: School of Economics and Management, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-17

Abstract: In this paper, a vehicle routing problem (VRP) model considering delivery time windows and variable service time is established for the delivery problem in community group purchasing. A solution model for an improved ant colony algorithm (ACA) is proposed by improving the initial feasible solution and the neighbourhood search mechanism of the ant colony algorithm. The algorithm of the improved ant colony and the commonly used algorithm are solved for real cases and publicly available benchmark datasets, respectively, for comparative analysis. The results show that the improved ACA has stronger optimization capability, faster convergence speed, and has advantages in solving VRPTW problems with variable service time. The computational efficiency is also improved by 41% over the genetic algorithm (GA) in the solution of the benchmark dataset, which provides a certain reference for solving the community group distribution problem.

Keywords: community group buying; vehicle routing problem with time windows; simulated annealing algorithm; ant colony algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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