Abstract
The line-haul feeder vehicle routing problem (LFVRP) is a rather new and therefore hardly investigated problem and can be seen as vehicle routing problem with synchronisation constraints. Synchronisation takes place if two or more vehicles (small and large vehicles) meet at the same place and at the same time and perform a transshipment of goods. Small vehicles are used to serve customers which are difficult to access (e.g. due to traffic jams, narrow streets or limited parking space). The downside is their limited capacity. To avoid the journey back to the depot, the small vehicle can meet with a large vehicle at a customer with enough space for reloading. Thus, the small vehicle uses the large vehicle as virtual depot and is able to save time and reduce costs. In Brandstätter and Reimann (Eur J Oper Res 270:157–170, 2018), we already introduced two promising solution approaches to master the LFVRP—the Linkage- and Split-Approach. Both approaches were shown to find high-quality solutions in short time. Moreover, we demonstrated the advantage of the LFVRP strategy when compared with the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem. With this paper, we propose and justify several improvements to our original algorithms. These include the application of Ant Colony Optimization, different local search operators, as well as the exact solution of a sub-problem. To highlight the performance contribution of these modifications, we perform a thorough and extensive computational experiment. We evaluate each algorithmic component individually as well as their combination and statistically validate the benefits. Overall, we find that the final algorithm improves our previous approaches by almost 9% at a computational cost of a few seconds.
Highlights
The influx of new residents is a common phenomenon for major cities around the world
We were able to reduce the total costs—in comparison with the benchmark results presented in Table 7—for the Solomon instance set by 7.8% and the Chen instance set by 9.2% which results in a total improvement by 8.6%
Current VRP variants address some of these challenges but do not cover all of them
Summary
The influx of new residents is a common phenomenon for major cities around the world. Some of these challenges are increasing demands, crowded streets with hardly any parking space and increasing land prices for buying Another prominent problem is the particulate matter pollution, which is addressed, especially by environmental and governmental institutions (see [22]). New problems will be defined and analysed so that the findings can be used by city logistics companies to remain competitive One of these problems is the line-haul feeder vehicle routing problem (LFVRP) which can be described as follows. The large vehicle is acting as a virtual depot (VD) for the small vehicle class Both vehicles need to be at the same place at the same time to be able to perform a transshipment of goods.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
