Agent Architecture and Design Framework for VRPTW in Distribution Center

摘要

Limited by the capacity of its own fleet of vehicles, a logistics distribution center cannot handle all the transportation job orders and have to outsource some to other local transportation companies. By analyzing different kinds of job orders received from the customers, an agent-based model is presented to describe the problem and a general model of vehicle capacity planning system (VCPS) is built to tackle the problem, which models the problem as a modified and more complicated vehicle routing problem with time window constraints (VRPTW). In the study case, a taboo search (TS) method is applied to find a solution for the problem. From the results, some new rules on how to assign jobs for outsourcing are derived, and it shows the new rules is better than the traditional existing rules currently adopted by the practitioners.