Authors:
Philip Mourdjis
1
;
Fiona Polack
1
;
Peter Cowling
1
;
Yujie Chen
1
and
Martin Robinson
2
Affiliations:
1
University of York, United Kingdom
;
2
Transfaction Ltd., United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Vehicle routing, Pickup-and-delivery, Real-world Problem.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Logistics
;
Operational Research
;
OR in Transportation
;
Pattern Recognition
;
Routing
;
Scheduling
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Small logistics companies operate in many towns and cities across the UK, and need to be able to compete with larger delivery companies who can leverage economies of scale to provide lower costs to customers. If small companies were willing to work together, all could benefit from reduced operating costs, enabling them to compete and survive against larger delivery companies. In cooperation with Transfaction Ltd., we investigate dynamic scheduling of shared loads for real-world, long distance truck haulage in the UK. We model the problem as a dynamic pickup and multiple delivery problem (PMDP). The PMDP is a one-many problem (one pickup, many drop-offs), unlike the more widely researched one-one (pickup and delivery problem, PDP) and one-many-one (vehicle routing problem, VRP) problems.