Abstract
In this paper, we present a new problem arising at a tactical level of setting a last-mile parcel delivery service in a city by considering different Transportation Companies (TC), which differ in cost and service quality. The courier must decide which TCs to select for the service in order to minimize the total cost and maximize the total service quality. We show that the problem can be modeled as a new packing problem, the Generalized Bin Packing Problem with bin-dependent item profits (GBPPI), where the items are the parcels to deliver and the bins are the TCs. The aim of the GBPPI is to select the appropriate fleet from TCs and determine the optimal assignment of parcels to vehicles such that the overall net cost is minimized. This cost takes into account both transportation costs and service quality. We provide a Mixed Integer Programming formulation of the problem, which is the starting point for the development of efficient heuristics that can address the GBPPI for instances involving up to 1000 items. Extensive computational tests show the accuracy of the proposed methods. Finally, we present a last-mile logistics case study of an international courier which addresses this problem.
Highlights
The transportation services market is estimated to be worth approximately 3 trillion euros worldwide with a gross value added (GVA) of 600 billion in the EU-28 at basic prices, corresponding approximately to 5% of the total GVA (European Commission, 2017)
As we show the matheuristic can be exploited without parallel computation, this approach is strongly recommended when GBPPI is employed as a subproblem of a larger problem, and significantly improves the performance of the matheuristic
We report the percentage gap of the best constructive function with the classical Best Fit Decreasing (BFD), namely min. These results show that while the BFD is still useful for the Generalized Bin Packing Problem (GBPP), it has to be replaces with better constructive heuristics when addressing the GBPPI because, as already discussed, the introduction of bin-dependent item problems does not change the solution set but strongly modifies the nature of the problem
Summary
A DAUIN, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy b ICT for City Logistics and Enterprises Lab, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy c CIRRELT, Montreal, Canada article info. We present a new problem arising at a tactical level of setting a last-mile parcel delivery service in a city by considering different Transportation Companies (TC), which differ in cost and service quality. We show that the problem can be modeled as a new packing problem, the Generalized Bin Packing Problem with bin-dependent item profits (GBPPI), where the items are the parcels to deliver and the bins are the TCs. The aim of the GBPPI is to select the appropriate fleet from TCs and determine the optimal assignment of parcels to vehicles such that the overall net cost is minimized. The aim of the GBPPI is to select the appropriate fleet from TCs and determine the optimal assignment of parcels to vehicles such that the overall net cost is minimized This cost takes into account both transportation costs and service quality. We present a last-mile logistics case study of an international courier which addresses this problem
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