Pickup and delivery selection: problem formulation and extension to problem variants

Abstract

Operational planning decisions of a carrier consist of accepting transport requests and constructing vehicle routes. However, a carrier has only a limited capacity within his own vehicle fleet and can only serve a selection of clients. Transport requests are accepted only if they contribute to a higher total profit. This practical aspect is modelled with the Pickup and Delivery with selection of customers. A mixed-integer programming formulation is given. It is indicated how the problem is solved by means of a meta-heuristic, more specifically a tabu-embedded simulated annealing algorithm. A number of alternative settings may appear in practice. They are discussed in this article.