EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2291. Branch-and-cut approaches for a Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Porters

Invited abstract in session MD-58: Branch-and-Cut, stream Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Liberty 1.13

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Suheyb Erdemci
University of Southampton
2. David Lai
Queen Mary University of London
3. Carlos Lamas-Fernandez
Southampton Business School, University of Southampton
4. Antonio Martinez Sykora
Management School, University of Southampton

Abstract

Vehicles used in logistics, such as trucks and vans, face a range of challenges, including limited kerbside availability, traffic congestion, air and noise pollution, and city regulations (e.g., ULEZ in London). As a result, there is an increasing reliance on alternative delivery methods for last-mile operations, such as porters, bikes, and drones. In this work, we present a two-echelon vehicle routing problem with porters that captures the real-life operational requirements. In the first echelon, goods are transported from the depot to intermediate depots, referred to as micro-consolidation points. Porters then handle the final delivery to customers on foot in the second echelon. The porter routes are subject to constraints related to weight, volume, and maximum distance. Since porters are allowed to revisit micro-consolidation points to resupply, synchronizing these operations becomes a complex challenge. We propose two new exponential-size MILP formulations to model this structure and introduce separation algorithms to manage the exponentially sized constraints. We conduct experiments to compare the performance of the formulations and the proposed separation algorithms. To support our experiments, we introduce a new benchmark dataset of realistic instances to evaluate the scalability and performance of the proposed approaches. Managerial insights are derived by analyzing the effects of parcel sizes and porter types.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers