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Bus tour-based routing and truck deployment for small-package shipping companies

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  • Zhen, Lu
  • Xia, Jun
  • Huang, Lin
  • Wu, Yiwei

Abstract

This study investigates a joint optimisation of routing and truck deployment for a small-package shipping company. Bus tour-based services are provided to collect express packages at customer bases. The objective of the optimisation problem is to minimise the average waiting time for packages stored at the customer bases. We first propose a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model. The proposed formulation is linearised and made solvable by an off-the-shelf mixed-integer linear programming solver. For solving larger instances of the problem, we propose two optimisation approaches that can obtain near-optimal solutions – a local branching-based method and a particle swarm optimisation-based method. We conduct numerical experiments to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution methods. The results indicate that both methods can obtain optimal solutions quickly for most of the small-scale instances. For medium-size instances, the local branching-based method performs best, and the PSO-based method outperforms the others for large-size instances.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhen, Lu & Xia, Jun & Huang, Lin & Wu, Yiwei, 2020. "Bus tour-based routing and truck deployment for small-package shipping companies," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transe:v:136:y:2020:i:c:s1366554518314285
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2020.101889
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    References listed on IDEAS

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