Abstract
The double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks involves the transportation of goods between two regions. In one region, a vehicle carrying a container visits customers, where pallets of goods are loaded into the container. The container is then shipped to a different region, where another vehicle visits another set of customers where the pallets are unloaded. Pallets are loaded in several rows inside the container, where each row follows the last-in-first-out principle. The standard test instances for the double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks implies the use of a 45-foot pallet wide container to carry EUR-1 pallets. This paper investigates the effect on transportation costs if an open side container could be used when transporting the pallets. Computational experiments show savings in transportation costs of up to 20%. Moreover, by using a container loaded from the side, rather than from the rear, the defining attributes of the double traveling salesman problem seem to be lost.
Highlights
Petersen and Madsen [1] introduced an optimization problem referred to as the double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks, based on a prospective customer of a company producing computer software systems for transportation companies
The two traveling salesman problems induced by dropping all loading constraints on both the pickup and the delivery region of any instance are solved to optimality independently in order to obtain a lower bound: no container configuration or loading pattern can possibly improve the sum of the costs of the two optimal traveling salesman problem solutions
As the problem provided ample venues for research on theoretical aspects of the problem, as well as on the development of efficient heuristic and exact solution methods, it might be valid to ask whether additional aspects of the real-world application may have been overlooked
Summary
Petersen and Madsen [1] introduced an optimization problem referred to as the double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks, based on a prospective customer of a company producing computer software systems for transportation companies. Each row of pallets forms a stack that must be loaded and unloaded based on a first-in-last-out principle This provides a set of difficult linking constraints that must be taken into consideration when routing the vehicle in both the pickup region and the delivery region. The double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks has received significant attention from researchers, examining both exact and heuristic solution methods, as well as performing studies on computational complexity and polyhedral analysis. Open side versions exist for many container sizes, where goods can be loaded from one of the long sides of the container The existence of such capabilities would open up a wide range of options in the context of the double traveling salesman problem with multiple stacks.
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