EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1992. A Variable Neighbourhood Search Algorithm for the Truck-Porters Routing Problem

Invited abstract in session WB-58: Heuristics for Vehicle Routing 1, stream Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Liberty 1.13

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Antonio Martinez Sykora
Management School, University of Southampton
2. Chris Potts
School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Southampton
3. Mohammed Alammar
College of Science and Humanities, Shaqra University
4. Stefano Coniglio
Department of Economics, University of Bergamo

Abstract

In the truck-porters routing problem (TPRP), a single truck and a limited number of couriers using bikes, also referred as porters, are available at the main depot. There is a set of customers whose demand is known beforehand. Some customers can be visited only by the truck, others must be served by porters, and there is a third type of customers that can be served either by the truck or by porters. Porters carry a single bag that has a weight limitation, limiting the number of items that can be delivered in one trip. However, a porter can revisit the depot to collect further items for delivery as soon as the working time does not exceed a time limitation. The TPRP problem consists of designing a set of minimum-cost routes, where each route starts and ends at the depot and satisfies capacity and travel time constraints. We propose a VNS algorithm that is able to find the optimal solutions in small size instances as well as best known solutions in larger instances. The VNS is also tested against a problem variant, the Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem, which is a problem that has been explored in the literature, for which the best solution is improved on 5 specific instances, showing a solid behaviour of the algorithm.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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