Assessing the benefits of using swap locations in the Pickup and Delivery Problem

Details

Supervisors

Tancrez ; Hacardiaux

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en ingénieur de gestion (Mons)

Abstract

In a globalizing world economy, logistics providers have to create solutions to satisfy customer’s requests while meeting environmental requirements and ensuring low costs of transport. To this end, the Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP) aims at designing routes such that the distance traveled empty is as short as possible, given a set of transportation requests. In this strategy, driving time constraint appears to be a key success factor since it restricts the number of round trip opportunities for each vehicle. To overcome time pressure, it could be interesting for drivers to share the deliveries by swapping their cargo along the way. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of using swap locations in the Pickup and Delivery Problem. To achieve this, we present the Swap-Body Pickup and Delivery Problem (SBPDP) as a variant of the PDP in which intermediate locations can be used by vehicles to swap their trailers. A mixed integer programming formulation is proposed and computational experiments are conducted so that we can assess the merits of our swap-body approach, comparatively with a classical stay-with version of the PDP. We find that enabling swap locations appears to be of real interest when an average transportation request consumes at least 23% of the available time. Finally, our model allows fleet to maintain the best level of empty trips reduction (-54%), even under increasing time pressure, i.e. when lead time decreases or when distance to be covered increases – two challenges posed by the extent of trade globalization.