Abstract:
Parcel delivery is a complex logistic service, as it serves many small or medium-sized customers who may send or receive parcels. Modeling such delivery system needs to integrate two different research areas of hub location and vehicle routing. As it totally depends on the network and the linkage of the nodes, in this paper, some door-to-door service providers are taken into account to provide suitable information for modeling parcel deliveries of sparse and wide countries. Since the proposed mixed-integer programming model is NP-hard, a new multi-steps solution method based on a simulated annealing algorithm and local search is presented. The results of the proposed model and the solution method are evaluated based on some small test problems. The performance of the solution method is illustrated by solving a real case with all capital cities of 31 provinces in Iran.
Machine summary:
Modeling such delivery system needs to integrate two different research areas of hub location and vehicle routing.
Since the proposed mixed-integer programming model is NP-hard, a new multi-steps solution method based on a simulated annealing algorithm and local search is presented.
To model a parcel delivery system, two different subjects of hub location and vehicle routing problems should be considered.
Literature review To model a parcel delivery service, two different areas of hub location and vehicle routing problem were integrated as hub location-routing problem (Wasner & Zäpfel, 2004).
Considering parcel delivery services of Turkey, Kara and Tansel (2001) proposed the problem of last arrival hub location problem in which unavoidable waiting times can occur at hubs because of lack of synchronization of arriving and departing vehicles.
They considered two conflict objectives of maximizing profit and maximizing service level and solved the model based on compromise programming and genetic algorithm and implemented the method on a relatively small network with 16 nodes in Serbia.
Estrada-Romeu and Robusté (2015) considered hub location problem with stopover to identify if consolidation strategies were cost-efficient in less-than- truckload systems similar to parcel delivery services.
t. (2) (3) (View the image of this page) Analyzing the objective function of the parcel delivery system (1), it consists of the earned profit from the delivered parcels of the covered nodes minus the transportation costs of routes and line hauls, the costs of opening new routes, and penalty costs of violated routes.
Parcel delivery network after local search Hub Node Route connection Line haul connection Fig. 5.