EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

2247. Analyzing the Benefits of Node Aggregations in Vehicle Routing Problems

Invited abstract in session WD-64: Heuristics for Vehicle Routing 2, stream VeRoLog - Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: S16 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Patricia Zech
Chair for Supply Chain Management, European University Viadrina
2. Christian Almeder
Chair for Supply Chain Management, European University Viadrina

Abstract

The constant growth of e-commerce challenges last mile delivery service providers to find cost-efficient route plans that fulfill the demand of thousands of customers daily. To facilitate problem abstraction, a variety of distribution or collection problems as postal delivery or garbage collection are modelled as arc routing problems. Compared to dense urban areas, where an aggregated view on arcs instead of nodes is straight forward for reducing the complexity of the problem, the situation in rural or suburban areas is different. Aggregation of nodes along a long street segment might cause a depletion of the route quality. We are investigating the possibility of various node aggregation heuristics for such situations, which transforms a large-scale vehicle routing problem (VRP) into a smaller capacitated general routing problem (CGRP), where demand might be located on nodes, edges, or arcs. Several mathematical problem formulations for the latter are analyzed and evaluated regarding their solution performance compared to standard VRP models. The goal is to specify the trade-off between the level of aggregation, the loss of solution quality and the decrease in computational time.

Keywords

Status: accepted


Back to the list of papers