Research On The Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Window And Three-dimensional Pallet Loading Constraints Based On Spark

Proliferation of multi-national corporations and extremely competitive business environment have led to an unprecedented demand for third-party logistics services.However,recent works on the Vehicle Routing Problem(VRP),only consider simple constraints.They also do not scale well to real-world problems encountered in logistics industry.In this paper,we introduce a new vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional pallet loading and time window constraints.Three dimensional pallet loading and time window are two usual constraints in real-world situation,such as electric business and agricultural products delivery.To handle the considered new vehicle routing problem,we proposed a hybrid algorithm combining Tabu Search and Artificial Bee Colony algorithms.New benchmark data based on realistic case are generated because the proposed VRP has never addressed in other literatures.The proposed algorithm is also applied in Solomon's instances for the vehicle routing problem with time window constraints,in order to test the efficiency and validity.Computational results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to other heuristic algorithms.Traditional sequence heuristics have advantages over exact algorithms on time consuming,while they still show weakness as the scale and complexity of problems increase.The proposed hybrid algorithm belongs to population algorithms,and the proposed VRP consists of two NP problems:the three dimensional packing problem and the vehicle routing problem.Therefore,we design a distributed model for the proposed hybrid algorithm and use Spark to implement the distributed algorithm.Results show that the distributed strategy improves the computing efficiency...