Heuristic Routing Software for Planning of Combined Road Transport with Swap Bodies: A Practical Case

The rising number of loading devices called swap bodies in road transport has created new opportunities for carriers and novel challenges for researchers in vehicle routing synchronization. Nevertheless, there are few vehicle routing models in literature that integrate swap bodies for combined road transport and there is no known best practice in the industry to handle these opportunities. In this paper we aim to examine to which extent Information Systems and Operations Research can help to provide solutions for this new planning problem and evaluate the potential of vehicle routing under consideration of swap bodies regarding a real world case of a major carrier. We develop a routing heuristic and prototype software to support routing considering loading options with swap bodies. The software is tested with real world data from the cooperating industry partner. We observe significant reductions in costs, total driven kilometers and operating times. Thus, we demonstrate the importance to integrate swap bodies in vehicle routing models for road transport. Furthermore, the developed software can be a basis for future work on exact planning models.