Research On Collaborative Vehicle Routing Optimization Considering Common Customers

With the vigorous development of e-commerce,logistics and distribution operations present the characteristics of "small batch,multi-batch",while the scale and scope of logistics distribution is also expanding,resulting in high transportation costs,low vehicle utilization rate,traffic congestion,environmental pollution,logistics service level does not meet the standard of customer satisfaction and a series of problems are increasingly prominent.In the last kilometer of distribution,there is a situation where some distribution centers may provide distribution services to a particular public area or some co-customers at the same time,i.e.some customers require only one distribution center to provide distribution services,while some customers require multiple distribution centers to provide distribution services(Customers who need multiple distribution centers to provide services are co-customers of the enterprise).When there are co-customers,the distribution routes of the two distribution centers will produce coupling(coupling points are common customer points),which leads to a great negative impact,such as repeated cross-over of distribution routes lead to high logistics transportation costs,low vehicle utilization,traffic congestion,logistics service levels do not meet customer satisfaction standards and so on.Therefore,how to deal with the problem of inter-enterprise mutual customers is key.The main research work of this paper is as follows:(1)In order to solve the situation of common customers,from the point of view of enterprises and customers,to the lowest distribution cost as the target function,a kind of multi-distribution center,and time window restrictions of VRP model.From the point of view of the enterprise,consider enterprise collaboration,so that each distribution center is no longer limited to their own distribution customers,not only to accept the distribution tasks entrusted by other distribution centers,but also to other distribution centers,so as to introduce fixed vehicle use costs in the target function,vehicle driving costs and customer demand transfer costs(synergy costs).At the same time,this paper also from the customer's point of view,in order to better meet the customer's requirements for time window and service quality,the target function in the introduction of the penalty function that violates the time window.(2)In this paper,the two-stage heuristic algorithm "classification first,then solution" is used to solve the problem.In the first stage,the algorithm of customer clustering using the transfer rules of ant colony algorithm is proposed,which classifies the common customers based on the distribution center,that is,the customers who are in need of multiple distribution centers are transferred to a distribution center to complete the distribution,thus forming customer clustering information and transforming the multi-yard problem into a single yard problem.In the second stage,the improved ant colony algorithm is used to solve the situation of each garage.(3)Design example to verify.In order to evaluate the cost savings generated by this model,the results of the collaborative scheme and the results of the non-collaborative scheme are compared,and the results show that the two schemes are basically consistent in terms of vehicle usage and average vehicle utilization,but under the collaborative scheme,both the cost of the respective distribution center and the overall cost of synergy are reduced to some extent.This shows that multi-distribution center coordination can reduce the distribution cost of the whole logistics system,which proves the rationality and effectiveness of the model.This paper considers the situation of common customers in the distribution process,and puts forward the problem of considering the co-vehicle path of the common customer.Considering the collaborative vehicle routing problem of common customers,we can evaluate the potential benefits of cooperation between independent distribution centers.By calculating and comparing the benefits of each independent distribution center before and after cooperation,each independent distribution center may urge them to form a strategic cooperative relationship and make a cooperation plan.At the same time,the model can also be used to optimize the cooperation between existing enterprises.