The Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Transshipment Nodes and Occasional Drivers: Formulation and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic

This research introduces a new variant of the two-echelon vehicle routing problem (2EVRP) called with transshipment nodes and occasional drivers (2EVRP-TN-OD). In addition to city freighters in second-echelon network, set (ODs) is available serve customers. ODs are basis crowd-shipping system which crowds planned trips willing take detours deliver packages exchange for some compensation. To customers, collect assigned at either satellite served by first-echelon trucks or freighters. We formulate this as mixed-integer nonlinear programming model develop an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) solve it. New problem-specific destroy repair operators tailored local procedure embedded into ALNS deal problem’s unique characteristics. The experiments show that proposed effectively solves 2EVRP-TN-OD outperforming Gurobi terms both solution quality computational time. Moreover, confirm employing leads lower operational costs. Sensitivity analyses on characteristics impact presented interesting managerial insights from 2EVRP-TN-OD.