The Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Intermediate Facilities, and Occasional Drivers

This research introduces a new variant of two-echelon vehicle routing problems inspired from the city logistics. The problem considers a two-echelon freight distribution network where customers are located at the second echelon while their goods are transported from the source in the first echelon to intermediate facilities, i.e., satellites, parcel lockers, and transshipment nodes. Customers can receive their goods that can be delivered by either city freighters or occasional drivers at their homes or are assigned to perform self-pickup at selected parcel lockers. The objective is to minimize total operational cost. We name the problem the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Intermediate Facilities, and Occasional Drivers (2E-VRPTW-IF-OD) and cast the problem as a mixed integer linear programming model and devise a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search (HALNS) using, amongst others, set-partitioning like neighborhoods to provide solutions for newly generated 2E-VRPTW-IF-OD instances. Extensive experiments show high-quality performance of HALNS for solving two special cases of 2E-VRPTW-IF-OD. We further improve 24 best-known solutions for one of the special cases. Finally, we also derive various interesting managerial insights