A hybrid approach on multi-objective route planning and assignment optimization for urban lorry transportation

Abstract

In urban goods delivery, the service quality is affected by number of lorry, distance between two points, road blocking and assigned time of customers, etc. The lower efficiency of human power and delivery time are caused from poor route planning. A hybrid approach of route finding, which is involved in multi-objectives and lorry assignment, is developed for achieving the optimal delivery schedule and decreasing the transportation cost in this research. Two stages in this method are proposed. The first stage is the pre-assigned scheduling, which is dependent on customer requirement, time adjustment, and number of lorry. Next, the route planning is done by delivered location and transportation time as well as reducing the number of lorry. In this stage, the Google Map API is introduced to calculate the distance and time of two or more locations. Meanwhile, the optimal assignment can be obtained by group-based optimization process. To verify the feasibility of this approach, ten formal route planning are re-analyzed. The results show that the total delivery distance is reduced 34.1% and the transportation time is reduced 21.6%. Obviously, good promising for obtaining better delivery service quality is presented in this approach.