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An Illumination Algorithm Approach to Solving the Micro-Depot Routing Problem

Urquhart, Neil; Hoehl, Silke; Hart, Emma

Authors

Silke Hoehl



Abstract

An increasing emphasis on reducing pollution and congestion in city centres combined with an increase in online shopping is changing the ways in which logistics companies address vehicle routing problems (VRP). We introduce the {\em micro-depot}-VRP, in which a single supply vehicle is used to supply a set of micro-depots distributed across a city; deliveries are then made from the micro-depot by couriers using electric vehicles, bicycles and on foot.
We present a formal definition of the problem, and propose a representation that can be used with an optimisation algorithm to minimise the total cost associated with delivering packages. Using five instances created from real-data obtained from delivery companies operating within the City of Frankfurt, we apply an illumination algorithm in order to obtain a set of results that minimise costs but have differing characteristics in terms of emissions, distance travelled and number of couriers used. Results show that solutions can be obtained that have equivalent costs to the baseline standard VRP solution, but considerably improve on this in terms of minimising the secondary criteria relating to emissions, couriers and distance.

Citation

Urquhart, N., Hoehl, S., & Hart, E. (2019, July). An Illumination Algorithm Approach to Solving the Micro-Depot Routing Problem. Presented at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO '19), Prague, Czech Republic

Presentation Conference Type Conference Paper (published)
Conference Name Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO '19)
Start Date Jul 13, 2019
End Date Jul 17, 2019
Acceptance Date Mar 21, 2019
Publication Date Jul 13, 2019
Deposit Date Apr 8, 2019
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages 1347-1355
Book Title GECCO '19: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
ISBN 978-1-4503-6748-6
DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3321707.3321767
Keywords vehicle routing problems (VRP); quality-diversity algorithms; micro-depots; delivery companies; illumination algorithm; couriers; emissions
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1715163
Publisher URL https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3321707.3321767






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