Title: A VNS solution and objectives tradeoffs for real-life large-scale vehicle routing problems

Authors: Yongzhong Wu; Mianmian Huang; Jianjun Yu; Qiran Wang

Addresses: School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China ' School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China ' School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China ' School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

Abstract: With the fast development of urban logistics, real-life vehicle routing problems (VRP) are characterised by their large size and complicated objectives and constraints. In contrast, most research on VRP has been based on classic test cases which are relatively small and have standard objectives. By investigating the case of a real urban security carrier in China, this paper proposes an efficient variable neighbourhood search (VNS) for large-scale VRP with various objectives and constraints, including number of vehicles, total travel time, total travel distance, total waiting time and total late time. The method is used to explore the tradeoffs among different objectives and constraints. It is found that although these objectives and constraints are contradictory by nature, increasing the weighting factor of one does not necessarily undermine (or at least not significantly undermine) the others. Such dynamics in the tradeoffs among different objectives provides users with more flexibility.

Keywords: vehicle routing problem; VRP; large-scale; variable neighbourhood search; VNS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2021.120661

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.39 No.4, pp.565 - 590

Received: 15 Sep 2019
Accepted: 06 Jan 2020
Published online: 31 Jan 2022 *

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