A vehicle routing problem with pickups, deliveries, and handling costs

摘要

This paper proposes a novel and practical vehicle routing problem with pickups, deliveriesand handling costs (VRPPD-H). The VRPPD-H extends the conventional vehicle routingproblem with pickups and deliveries (VRPPD) by taking into account additional handling costscaused by loading and unloading operations for cargo rearrangement. Four mixed integer linearprogramming models are first built for the VRPPD-H under the four different cargo storage andhandling policies. Two types of branch-and-cut exact algorithms are subsequently used to solveeach of these four models. Finally, numerical experiments are carried out to assess the modelsand algorithms proposed in this study.