This research proposes a new variant of two-echelon vehicle routing problem called the two-echelon vehicle routing problem in city logistics (2E-VRPCL). The problem considers two levels of freight distribution network where customers are located at the second echelon while their goods are transported to various intermediate facilities from the source of goods in the first echelon. Customers can receive their goods at their homes or are assigned to perform self-pickup at the nearest alternative pick-up points. Two types of fleets, city freighters and occasional drivers, are available to deliver goods to customers’ homes. In order to enhance the utilization of occasional drivers, alternative intermediate facilities called transshipment nodes are considered in the problem. The objective of 2E-VRPCL is to minimize the total operational cost. We cast the problem into a mixed integer linear programming model and devise a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search (HALNS) using, amongst others, set-partitioning like neighborhoods, to provide solutions for newly generated 2E-VRPCL instances. Extensive experiments show that a high-quality performance of HALNS for solving two special cases of 2E-VRPCL. Besides, we improve 24 best-known solutions for one of the special cases. Our experimental results confirm that the system in 2E-VRPCL becomes more beneficial under several circumstances, i.e., wider time windows of occasional drivers and customers, higher capacity values of covering locations, and higher capacity values of transshipment nodes. Higher capacity values of transshipment nodes also result in higher utilization of ODs while lower capacity values require the system to use more city freighters.

This research proposes a new variant of two-echelon vehicle routing problem called the two-echelon vehicle routing problem in city logistics (2E-VRPCL). The problem considers two levels of freight distribution network where customers are located at the second echelon while their goods are transported to various intermediate facilities from the source of goods in the first echelon. Customers can receive their goods at their homes or are assigned to perform self-pickup at the nearest alternative pick-up points. Two types of fleets, city freighters and occasional drivers, are available to deliver goods to customers’ homes. In order to enhance the utilization of occasional drivers, alternative intermediate facilities called transshipment nodes are considered in the problem. The objective of 2E-VRPCL is to minimize the total operational cost. We cast the problem into a mixed integer linear programming model and devise a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search (HALNS) using, amongst others, set-partitioning like neighborhoods, to provide solutions for newly generated 2E-VRPCL instances. Extensive experiments show that a high-quality performance of HALNS for solving two special cases of 2E-VRPCL. Besides, we improve 24 best-known solutions for one of the special cases. Our experimental results confirm that the system in 2E-VRPCL becomes more beneficial under several circumstances, i.e., wider time windows of occasional drivers and customers, higher capacity values of covering locations, and higher capacity values of transshipment nodes. Higher capacity values of transshipment nodes also result in higher utilization of ODs while lower capacity values require the system to use more city freighters.

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