Covering delivery problem with electric vehicle and parcel lockers: Variable neighborhood search approach

Abstract

Minimizing total delivery time and carbon footprint in last mile delivery presents a real challenge in logistic field. Usage of electric vehicles in combination with parcel lockers responds to these challenges. In this paper we introduce the covering delivery problem in last mile with electric vehicle and parcel lockers. The proposed problem aims to design a tour for a given electric vehicle so that customers’ demands are met either by visiting them directly or they are covered by parcel lockers included in the tour. The overall goal is to minimize the total time needed to perform a tour which includes the total traveling time over the tour and charging time at charging stations where the charging station can also serve as parcel locker. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer programming model and small size instances are solved using commercial MIP solver, while for large scale ones we develop a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) heuristic. As an improvement procedure the developed VNS uses a new variable neighborhood descent (VND) variant called sequential-mixed VND. Extensive computational results have been performed to assess the performances of the proposed VNS heuristic. It turns out that the proposed heuristic is able to successfully tackle the studied problem.