Tourenplanung mittelständischer Speditionsunternehmen in Stückgutkooperationen: Modellierung und heuristische Lösungsverfahren

As a consequence of globalisation and increasing customer expectations, medium-sized less-than-truckload carriers operate together in cooperations. Each cooperative member faces a multitude of requirements when constructing a low-cost, feasible set of routes. Taking up this problem, we take into consideration among other aspects heterogeneous vehicles, time windows, simultaneous pick-up and delivery at customer locations, as well as the multiple use of vehicles and assignment of vehicles to loading bays at the depot. The resulting vehicle routing problem can be formulated as a mixed-integer linear program, and we use ILOG CPLEX to solve small instances. In order to solve practical problem instances, there is a need for decision support systems. Algorithms which are to be implemented in such a system must be able to quickly generate good solutions. For this reason, we present a sampling procedure, a local search and a genetic algorithm, which we compare in a performance-analysis. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2007