The heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with intermediate storage facilities: a case study from the construction industry

Wholesalers of construction materials often need to transport large amounts of materials and heavy equipment from their depots to different construction sites and retail shops using a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles with limited sizes, different transportation capacities and vehicle configurations. Motivated by the case of a large construction wholesaler in the Netherlands, we consider a heterogeneous vehicle routing problem where there are intermediate storage facilities available for material transshipment and temporary storage. This research focuses on formulating the operational requirements, and analyzing the impact of storage facilities on vehicle utilization and routing strategies. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming model and solved efficiently using a metaheuristic. Computational results are presented on benchmark instances and real-life problem data