A Meet and Regret Heuristic for the Dynamic Vehicle Synchronization Problem with Soft Time Windows and Pickup and Delivery Requests

Description

Cargo bikes as environmentally friendly mode of transport gain increasing importance in urban freight delivery. This is not only due to greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful pollutants like particulate matters or nitrous oxides, but also due to increasing congestion in urban areas. Nevertheless, route optimization models that take cargo bike specific issues into account are rare. Therefore, we deal with a dynamic vehicle routing problem which considers (1) a mixed fleet consisting of cargo bikes and electric vans which start and end their tours at a micro-hub, (2) time windows at customers, (3) pickup and delivery constraints and (4) potential synchronization between cargo bikes to transship goods. This synchronization aspect stems from discussions with cargo bike delivery companies, who include such synchronized meetings between drivers manually, whenever an order has to be transported from the area of one driver into the area of another driver. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear program and small instances are solved to optimality by using CPLEX. For realistic instance sizes a metaheuristic based on a neighborhood search is developed. The generated test instances are based on realistic locations for customers, micro-hubs and meeting points for synchronized meetings in Vienna. Preliminary results for small instances show the impact of parameter values on the number of synchronizations.

Period	9 Sept 2019 → 11 Sept 2019
Event title	2nd SynchroTrans Workshop
Event type	Unkonwn
Degree of Recognition	International