Title: Multi-depot vehicle routing problem with cooperative transportation in terminal distribution

Authors: Jingjing Hu; Youfang Huang; Zhi-Hua Hu

Addresses: School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China ' Institutes of Logistics Science and Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China ' Institutes of Logistics Science and Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China

Abstract: We design a method of cooperative transportation. In this method, the original scattered transportation resources from express distribution point to terminal distribution center are integrated through cooperative transportation. This is a multi-depot vehicle routing problem. Firstly, we transform it into a vehicle routing problem with single-depot, and the branch and bound (B&B) algorithm is improved to solve it. Next, we design greedy algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem with multi-depot, and get the approximate optimal solution. The B&B algorithm can get accurate results while the computing time of greedy algorithm is shorter. Directly solving the problem can retain the characteristics of the original problem, and the solution can reflect the actual situation better. The transformation reduces the complexity of the problem, but some feasible solutions may be lost.The experimental results show that the efficiency of transportation resource utilisation is improved after optimisation, which is helpful to make more economic transportation decisions.

Keywords: cooperative transportation; multi-depot routing problem; branch and bound algorithm; greedy algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2021.117473

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2021 Vol.14 No.5, pp.588 - 614

Received: 23 Jun 2020
Accepted: 02 Sep 2020
Published online: 07 Sep 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article