Commodity Constrained Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem With Shipment Consolidation

The current market is extremely rich in products,customer needs are becoming more individual and diverse,and the demand side is becoming more and more important in the market.If a company wants to be profitable in the long term,it must satisfy customers with better services and attract more customers.In this context,how to deliver diversified products to customers with minimum cost and customer satisfaction is an urgent problem in the logistics industry.To address the above problem,some scholars propose the Commodity Constrained Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem(C-SDVRP)for multiple commodity delivery scenarios,considering the non-splittability of the same commodity order and minimizing the delivery cost as the objective.The non-splittability of the same commodity order is a practical requirement of customers in many scenarios,including the situation that the commodity itself cannot be split and the customer is not convenient to receive the same commodity multiple times.This problem has received a lot of attention from enterprises and academics because it takes into account the customer’s requirements in a more practical way.However,the published literatures do not consider the impact of shipment consolidation on the distribution efficiency of the C-SDVRP.First,the commodity temporary storage and integration at customers are considered and a mixed integer linear programming model of the Commodity Constrained Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem with Shipment Consolidation(C-SDVRPC)is constructed,based on the multi-commodity flow model,where we add some decision variables that portray shipment consolidation among vehicles.Second,we design a matheuristic algorithm where the routing part is solved through a variable neighborhood search(VNS)heuristic while the problem of inspecting the feasibility of shipment consolidation is solved through an integer programming model.Finally,the effectiveness of the matheuristic algorithm is further verified on 124 benchmark instances from the literature and a real case of a supermarket chain in China.In this thesis,C-SDVRPC is modeled and solved for the first time.The proposed mixed integer linear programming well portrays the process of shipment consolidation and is well scalable.The designed matheuristic algorithm provides ideas for solving the problem with good results.The benchmarking experiments show that the consolidation can effectively improve the distribution efficiency,especially when the customer locations are dispersed.A real-life case study of a supermarket chain found that C-SDVRPC can reduce costs by at least 15%with manageable overhead costs.