An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Transfers

The Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP) consists in defining a set of routes that satisfy transportation requests between a pickup point and a delivery point. This paper addresses a variant of the PDP where the requests are transportation demands arising from disabled persons. Vehicle passengers can change of vehicle during their trip on specific locations called “transfer points”. Solving this variant of the PDP yields new modeling and algorithmic difficulties. We design new heuristics capable of efficiently inserting requests through transfer points. These heuristics are embedded into an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search and evaluated on generated and real-life instances. Keywords— Pickup and Delivery Problem, Transfers, Large Neighborhood Search.