蓄冷式多温集配路径优化模型

现实中,由于配送中心选址对占地面积、土地成本等要求较高,加之物流企业资金有限或交通拥堵等限制,配送中心的设置通常会远离市中心。为了减少集货与配送车辆往返配送中心的次数以及车辆行驶距离,本文以总成本最小化,包括车辆派遣成本、行驶成本、碳排放成本、违背时间窗的惩罚成本、保温柜/箱成本、非整箱货物的配送成本,构建了1个配送中心由大型车辆为m个供应商采用蓄冷柜/蓄冷箱集货,由1个虚拟接驳点(中型车辆)结合小型车辆为n个零售门店采用蓄冷箱多温共配的路径优化模型,并设计了基于蚁群算法的混合更新信息素策略。以20个零售门店与6个海鲜供应商的三种品温海鲜品为仿真算例,验证了模型的有效性。实例分析发现：引入虚拟接驳点的配送线路数低于单纯的配送线路数;时间窗限制越宽松,引入虚拟接驳点的优越性越突出;具有虚拟接驳点的多温集配总成本低于自配送中心的集配总成本;具有虚拟接驳点的蓄冷式多温集配尤其利于低碳环保的冷链系统构建。     

Decision Support System of Truck Routing and Refueling: A Dual‐Objective Approach

The variable‐route vehicle‐refueling problem (VRVRP) is a variant of the network‐flow problem which seeks, for a vehicle traveling from origin s to destination d, both the route and the refueling policy (sequence of fuel stations to use between s and d) that jointly minimize the fuel cost of operating the vehicle. Commercial‐grade decision support systems that solve the VRVRP are widely used by motor carriers, but they provide heuristic solutions only. Exact methods are available from the academic side, but because they focus on minimizing costs, they tend to cut fuel costs in exchange for increased vehicle miles (which can increase fuel consumptions and pollutants emission). We propose a new approach to the VRVRP that allows carriers to jointly seek the two possibly conflicting goals; minimizing fuel cost and vehicle miles. Computational testing shows that our approach (i) outperforms the commercial software products in both goals, and (ii) finds solutions that require significantly less vehicle miles than those given by the exact method proposed in the academic literature, without incurring unacceptable increases in fuel cost.     

A simplified algorithm for the depot location problem

This paper describes a simplified optimization algorithm used for the solution of a classical depot location problem as presented in a Greek Manufacturing Company. Algorithms in the literature for this type of problem are based on the assumption of predetermined fixed costs which are independent of the final size of the depots. This assumption is usually far from reality; the size of each depot does not remain constant during the optimization process and so does the associated fixed cost which is variable with the size of the depot. This assumption is relaxed in the proposed algorithm; the associated fixed cost is modified each time a new customer is allocated to a depot thus changing the required depot size.     

装卸一体化的车辆路径问题及基于插入法的新禁忌算法

在日益激烈的市场竞争中,如何在降低成本的同时,让各个顾客尽快收到货物成了现代交通运输物流中一个越来越重要的考虑因素。基于某快递公司的运输实例,本文提出了装卸一体化的车辆路径问题模型,最终优化目标是最小化车辆运输时间和货物到各个顾客的时间的加权和,并给出了一种基于插入法的新禁忌算法,实验结果表明新禁忌算法在显著提高传统禁忌算法计算时间的同时,还能得到理想的成本,并且对节约快递公司的运输成本方面有显著成效。     

A New Approximation Algorithm for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem on a Tree

This paper presents a new approximation algorithm for a vehicle routing problem on a tree-shaped network with a single depot. Customers are located on vertices of the tree, and each customer has a positive demand. Demands of customers are served by a fleet of identical vehicles with limited capacity. It is assumed that the demand of a customer is splittable, i.e., it can be served by more than one vehicle. The problem we are concerned with in this paper asks to find a set of tours of the vehicles with minimum total lengths. Each tour begins at the depot, visits a subset of the customers and returns to the depot without violating the capacity constraint. We propose a 1.35078-approximation algorithm for the problem (exactly, ), which is an improvement over the existing 1.5-approximation.     

Hybridization of tabu search with feasible and infeasible local searches for periodic home health care logistics

This paper addresses a periodic vehicle routing problem encountered in home health care (HHC) logistics. It extends the classical Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (PVRPTW) to three types of demands of patients at home. Demands include transportation of drugs/medical devices between the HHC depot and patients׳ homes, delivery of special drugs from the hospital to patients, and delivery of blood samples from patients to the lab. Each patient requires a certain number of visits within a planning horizon and has a set of possible combinations of visit days. Daily routing should meet time window constraints associated with patients, the hospital and the lab. The problem consists in determining the visit days of each patient and vehicle routes for each day in order to minimize the maximal routing costs among all routes over the horizon. We propose a Tabu Search method combined with different local search schemes including both feasible and infeasible local searches. The proposed approaches are tested on a range of instances derived from existing Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window (VRPTW) benchmarks and benchmarks on special cases of our problem. Numerical results show that local search scheme starting with an infeasible local search with a small probability followed by a feasible local search with high probability is an interesting hybridization. Experiments with field data from a HHC company show that the proposed approach reduces the total cost and better balances the workloads of vehicles.     

An investigation into the vehicle routing problem with time windows and link capacity constraints

In this work, we investigate a new, yet practical, variant of the vehicle routing problem called the vehicle routing problem with time windows and link capacity constraints (VRPTWLC). The problem considers new constraints imposed on road links with regard to vehicle passing tonnage, which is motivated by a business project with a Hong Kong transportation company that transports hazardous materials (hazmats) across the city and between Hong Kong and mainland China. In order to solve this computationally challenging problem, we develop a tabu search heuristic with an adaptive penalty mechanism (TSAP) to help manage the company's vehicle fleet. A new data set and its generation scheme are also presented to help validate our solutions. Extensive computational experiments are conducted, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution approach.     

A visual interactive approach to classical and mixed vehicle routing problems with backhauls

In this paper a new visual interactive approach for the classical vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) and its extensions is presented. The classical VRPB is the problem of designing minimum cost routes from a single depot to two type customers that are known as Backhaul (pickup) and Linehaul (delivery) customers where deliveries after pickups are not allowed. The mixed VRPB is an extension of the classical VRPB where deliveries after pickups are allowed.     

考虑充电策略与电池损耗的电动汽车路径优化问题研究

针对目前研究电动物流车辆路径问题的文章未考虑电池损耗对运营成本的影响,且多在充电速率为恒定值的情况下对充电策略进行优化,本文将电动物流车辆在配送货物途中的充电时间和电池损耗成本纳入目标函数并建立了线性规划数学模型,统筹安排车辆行驶路径和充电策略使得物流企业整体运营成本最低。其次,提出了求解该问题的多阶段启发式算法MCWIGALNS。随后,通过多组算例验证了模型和算法的准确性。实验结果表明,考虑充电时间与深度放电成本的模型可以在配送距离不变或略有增加的情况下,较大幅度减少充电时间与电池损耗成本,到达降低运营成本的目的。最后,将算法实验结果与本领域已发表的成果进行比较,证明了MCWIGALNS算法对车辆路径问题具有出色的求解能力,提升了该问题理论成果的实用性。可以为物流企业电动汽车路径策略提供良好借鉴与帮助。     

供需未匹配的多车场多车型多货品可拆分取送货车辆路径问题

取送货车辆路径问题在多点调拨系统普遍存在,属于NP-hard问题。该问题研究通常需考虑车场数、车型种类、货品种类、客户服务次数等诸多因素,已有文献多假设客户间供需已匹配、单车场、单车型、单货品和取送货需求一次性满足,优化目标多设置为总路径最短。而从企业运营实践来看,运输方案不仅要规划客户间访问路径,还需进行客户间供需匹配;运输成本不仅与运距有关,还涉及运输货品的重量和派车成本;运输网络中多车场、多车型和多货品更加常见,且客户需求量往往大于车辆装载能力。因此,本文首次尝试基于"运距×运量"的车辆路径成本和基于额定吨位的固定派车成本之和最小为优化目标,建立同时考虑多车场、多车型、多货品、客户间供需未匹配和需求可拆分的取送货车辆路径问题模型,并设计基于大规模邻域搜索的迭代局部搜索求解算法。该算法采用基于运输效率提升的贪婪思想来快速构建高质量初始可行解,并通过引入四种移除算子、两种修复算子和车场车型调整优化策略形成大规模可行搜索邻域以增强全局寻优能力。基于18个文献算例和6个企业实例的数值实验结果表明：1）本文提出的算法在求解质量和求解效率方面均优于相关文献中的算法;2）相对人工调拨方案,本文设计的方案能够帮助企业节约33%的运输成本和21%的车次。本研究不仅可拓展取送货车辆路径问题现有理论,而且可为企业实际运营提供决策支持。     

Pareto mimic algorithm: An approach to the team orienteering problem

The team orienteering problem is an important variant of the vehicle routing problem. In this paper, a new algorithm, called Pareto mimic algorithm, is proposed to deal with it. This algorithm maintains a population of incumbent solutions which are updated using Pareto dominance. It uses a new operator, called mimic operator, to generate a new solution by imitating an incumbent solution. Furthermore, to improve the quality of a solution, it employs an operator, called swallow operator which attempts to swallow (or insert) an infeasible node and then repair the resulting infeasible solution. A comparative study supports the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, especially, our algorithm can quickly find new better results for several large-scale instances. We also demonstrate that Pareto mimic algorithm can be generalized to solve other routing problems, e.g., the capacitated vehicle routing problem.     

A memetic algorithm for the patient transportation problem

This paper addresses a real-life public patient transportation problem derived from the Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HKHA), which provides ambulance transportation services for disabled and elderly patients from one location to another. We model the problem as a multi-trip dial-a-ride problem (MTDARP), which requires designing several routes for each ambulance. A route is a sequence of locations, starting and terminating at the depot (hospital), according to which the ambulance picks up clients at the origins and delivers them to the destinations. A route is feasible only if it satisfies a series of side constraints, such as the pair and precedence constraints, capacity limit, ride time, route duration limit and time windows. Owing to the route duration limit, in particular, every ambulance is scheduled to operate several routes during the working period. To prevent the spread of disease, the interior of the ambulances needs to be disinfected at the depot between two consecutive trips. The primary aim of the problem investigated herein is to service more requests with the given resources, and to minimize the total travel cost for the same number of requests. In this paper, we provide a mathematical formulation for the problem and develop a memetic algorithm with a customized recombination operator. Moreover, the segment-based evaluation method is adapted to examine the moves quickly. The performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed using the real-world data from 2009 and compared with results obtained by solving the mathematical model. In addition, the proposed algorithm is adapted to solve the classic DARP instances, and found to perform well on medium-scale instances.     

Tabu search for the real-world carpooling problem

Carpooling is a flexible shared transportation system which can effectively reduce the vehicle numbers and fuel consumption. Although many carpooling systems have been proposed, most of them lack practicality, veracity, and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new useful variant model of the long-term carpooling problem which involves multiple origins and one destination. Such problems commonly occur in a wide number of carpooling situations in real-world scenarios. Our work is motivated by the practical needs to solve environmental pollution, parking problems, traffic jams and low utilization of resources. A Tabu search algorithm is proposed in this paper to solve the carpooling problem. The proposed algorithm aims at a wide range of passenger distribution and routing problems. The computational results based on real world user data show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we developed a mobile application based on our carpooling model.     

Management perspectives in physical distribution

Distribution problems may conveniently be divided into three categories—strategic, tactical and operational—and although each is bound to be affected by the others, they involve different time scales, different constraints and different requirements for information inputs. At a strategic level, models can be constructed for the rate of return on investment and for unit cost to help identify the major elements that affect performance, and in this way any specific change in given components in the distribution system can be traced and its possible effects can then be identified. Another strategic issue is the problem of depot location, and a particular feature of the number of depots in a distribution network is their effect on stock holding. In cases where 80–90% of total costs are independent of total mileage, it is more profitable to examine means for reducing fixed costs (including the size of the delivery fleet) than to invest an inordinate amount of resources on vehicle scheduling. However, the level of sophistication of distribution studies is likely to grow, as management becomes increasingly concerned about rising costs.     

The location-routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery: Formulations and a heuristic approach

In this paper, we consider a variant of the Location-Routing Problem (LRP), namely the LRP with simultaneous pickup and delivery (LRPSPD). The LRPSPD seeks to minimize total cost by simultaneously locating the depots and designing the vehicle routes that satisfy pickup and delivery demand of each customer at the same time. We propose two polynomial-size mixed integer linear programming formulations for the problem and a family of valid inequalities to strengthen the formulations. While the first formulation is a node-based formulation, the second one is a flow-based formulation. Furthermore, we propose a two-phase heuristic approach based on simulated annealing, tp_SA, to solve the large-size LRPSPD and two initialization heuristics to generate an initial solution for the tp_SA. We then empirically evaluate the strengths of the proposed formulations with respect to their ability to find optimal solutions or strong lower bounds, and investigate the performance of the proposed heuristic approach. Computational results show that the flow-based formulation performs better than the node-based formulation in terms of the solution quality and the computation time on small-size problems. However, the node-based formulation can yield competitive lower bounds in a reasonable amount of time on medium-size problems. Meantime, the proposed heuristic approach is computationally efficient in finding good quality solutions for the LRPSPD.     

电动汽车物流配送系统的换电站选址与路径优化问题研究

在能源、环境形势日益严重的今天,电动汽车因其清洁、节能的显著优势,已经逐步成为物流配送公司重要的新能源交通工具,优化物流配送网络成为电动汽车作为物流工具普及的一个重要问题。本文提出了电动汽车物流配送系统的换电站选址与配送路径优化问题,建立了整数规划模型,并设计禁忌搜索-改进Clarke-Wright 节省的两阶段启发式算法来求解该模型,提出了两种不同的禁忌准则,并且通过算例对这两种准则进行了比较。为了证明算法的有效性,还将该算法的结果同CPLEX的计算结果进行了比较,结果表明该算法更加有效和可靠。最后,对车辆的装载容量、电池续航里程和单位建站成本做敏感性分析,发现总成本随着装载容量的增加而显著降低,电池续航里程的提升有助于降低建站成本并降低目标函数值,而单位建站成本的增加可能减少建站个数,增加运输成本,但由于续航里程的限制,建站个数也可能保持不变。     

The multiple traveling salesman problem: an overview of formulations and solution procedures

The multiple traveling salesman problem (mTSP) is a generalization of the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP), where more than one salesman is allowed to be used in the solution. Moreover, the characteristics of the mTSP seem more appropriate for real-life applications, and it is also possible to extend the problem to a wide variety of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) by incorporating some additional side constraints. Although there exists a wide body of the literature for the TSP and the VRP, the mTSP has not received the same amount of attention. The purpose of this survey is to review the problem and its practical applications, to highlight some formulations and to describe exact and heuristic solution procedures proposed for this problem.     

Approximation schemes for Euclidean vehicle routing problems with time windows

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem. The paper considers two dimensional and one dimensional VRPTW, in which each demand must be serviced within the time window which is designated by its customer. In the two dimensional problem, each customer has the same unit demand. The paper gives a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme and an asymptotic polynomial time approximation scheme for the two dimensional and one dimensional problems under the Euclidean setting, respectively. With reasonable vehicle speed requirements, our algorithms could generate the solutions whose the total route length is \((1 + O(\varepsilon ))\) times of that of the optimum solutions.     

具有模糊旅行时间的VRP的一种混合遗传算法

传统确定性车辆路径问题是近几十年来运筹学领域研究的一个热点问题.但在许多实际的应用中,由于受客观世界中存在的不确定性因素以及人类观察、认识事物的模糊性的影响,车辆路径问题的某些参数可能是模糊的、不确定的.文中传统确定性车辆路径问题被扩展为具有模糊特征的模糊车辆路径问题.在对具有模糊旅行时间的车辆路径问题进行简单描述的基础上,构建了该问题的数学模型,并通过将模糊逻辑、模糊控制方法与传统车辆路径问题的遗传算法进行有效结合,提出了解决该问题的一种混合遗传算法.最后给出了该问题的一个计算实例,并通过随机模拟试验验证了该算法的有效性和优越性.     

协作车辆路径成本分摊问题的 B-T Shapley 方法

多个企业协作配送能显著地降低物流配送成本和减少尾气排放, 研究协作配送模型与成本分摊方法是亟需解决的关键问题.传统经典成本分摊方法需要计算所有子联盟的协作成本, 在本问题中等价于需要求解2N-1个 (N为企业数量) 复杂的车辆路径问题.本文建立了多方协作车辆路径问题模型, 分析了协作配送成本分摊问题的属性.基于经典的Shapley成本分摊方法, 提出了B-T (Binary Tree) Shapley近似方法, 不仅将成本分摊本身计算复杂度由O (N22N) 降为O (N2log2N) , 而且将需要求解的车辆路径问题数量由2N-1个锐减至2N-1个, 从而能够在合理时间内完成协作配送问题的成本分摊.通过求解算例和实际案例, 计算结果表明, B-T Shapley的耗时与Shapley方法相比几乎可以忽略不计, 更重要的是B-T Shapley与Shapley的成本分摊结果之间仅有细微的偏差, 其平均准确度可以达到95%左右.