Vehicle routing problems for last mile distribution after major disaster

Abstract

This study is dedicated to a complex Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) applied to the response phase after a natural disaster. Raised by the last mile distribution of relief goods after earthquakes, it is modelled as a rich VRP involving a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, multiple trips, multiple depots, and vehicle-site dependencies. The proposed method is a generic hybrid heuristic that uses a Set Partitioning formulation to add memory to a Multi-Start Iterated Local Search framework. To better fit the requirements of last mile distribution, the algorithm has been developed in partnership with members of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters and has been evaluated on real scenarios from Port-au-Prince earthquake. The heuristic quickly computes efficient routes while determining the number of required vehicles and the subset of depots to be used. Moreover, the computational results show that the proposed method is also competitive compared to the state of the art heuristics on closely related problems found in industrial distribution.

Keywords:

• Post-disaster relief
• humanitarian logistics
• vehicle routing
• last mile distribution
• heuristics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the OLIC project (Optimisation de la Logistique d’Intervention pour les Catastrophes majeures), funded by the Conseil Supérieur de la Formation et de la Recherche Stratégiques (CSFRS), France, and partially supported by CNPq-Brazil.