A hybrid pricing and cutting approach for the multi-shift full truckload vehicle routing problem

Xue, Ning, Bai, Ruibin, Qu, Rong and Aickelin, Uwe (2020) A hybrid pricing and cutting approach for the multi-shift full truckload vehicle routing problem. European Journal of Operational Research . ISSN 0377-2217

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Abstract

Full truckload transportation (FTL) in the form of freight containers represents one of the most important transportation modes in international trade. Due to large volume and scale, in FTL, delivery time is often less critical but cost and service quality are crucial. Therefore, efficiently solving large scale multiple shift FTL problems is becoming more and more important and requires further research. In one of our earlier studies, a set covering model and a three-stage solution method were developed for a multi-shift FTL problem. This paper extends the previous work and presents a significantly more efficient approach by hybridising pricing and cutting strategies with metaheuristics (a variable neighbourhood search and a genetic algorithm). The metaheuristics were adopted to find promising columns (vehicle routes) guided by pricing and cuts are dynamically generated to eliminate infeasible flow assignments caused by incompatible commodities. Computational experiments on real-life and artificial benchmark FTL problems showed superior performance both in terms of computational time and solution quality, when compared with previous MIP based three-stage methods and two existing metaheuristics. The proposed cutting and heuristic pricing approach can efficiently solve large scale real-life FTL problems.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: Transportation; Full truckload transport; Column generation; Pricing and cutting; Metaheuristics
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham Ningbo China > Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Computer Science
Identification Number: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.10.037
Depositing User: Wu, Cocoa
Date Deposited: 18 Dec 2020 08:47
Last Modified: 18 Dec 2020 08:47
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/64126

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