Solving a hybrid mixed fleet heterogeneous dial-a-ride problem in delay-sensitive container transportation

Abstract

The intensity of local truck container transport results from the ubiquitous development of container shipping. Optimal routing of container trucks contributes to cost savings of the service provider but also the reduction of traffic and detrimental emissions. In this paper, a variant of a Mixed Fleet Heterogeneous Dial-a-Ride Problem is proposed for a container truck routing problem. Our aim is an optimal routing of trucks carrying full and empty 20-foot and 40-foot containers, with multiple pick-ups and deliveries. Transportation is performed by alternatively fuelled vehicles (AFVs) for environmental reasons. The AFVs have a limited driving range and are allowed to refuel in any alternative fuel station. The main objective is minimising the total distance subject to matching the empty container demand and supply, necessary refuelling of the trucks, and service time windows.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterogeneous dial-a-ride problem
• full and empty container transportation
• green vehicle routing problem
• mixed-integer programming
• Lagrange relaxation

Acknowledgements

We thank the two reviewers whose excellent comments and suggestions for improvement resulted in a much better version of the paper. The authors are also grateful to Jan-Erik Justkowiak for his help on the CPLEX solver.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data sets are available on https://github.com/sezgitekil/FECMFGV-HDARP.git.

Additional information

Funding

The research of the first author was supported by the Friede Springer Foundation [grant number 111/2019]. The research of the third author was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [grant number WZ/WIZ-INZ/1/2019].

Notes on contributors

Sezgi Tekil-Ergün

Sezgi Tekil-Ergün is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at HHL (Germany) and in Management Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (Turkey). In addition to her Bachelor of Industrial Engineering from Doğuş University (Turkey), she has a master's degree in Industrial Engineering from Yildiz Technical University (Tukey). Her research interests focus on operational research, supply chain optimisation, logistics, and data analytics. Currently, she is working as a research associate at the Department of Management Information Science of the University of Siegen (Germany).

Erwin Pesch

Erwin Pesch is a full professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University in Siegen (Germany) and director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Management at the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, and has been appointed extraordinary professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He worked before as assistant professor at the University in Maastricht (Netherlands) and as a full professor at the Institute of Economics of the University in Bonn (Germany). He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a habilitation in Business Administration both from the Technical University Darmstadt (Germany). His research areas are in logistics, decision support, project management, routing and scheduling many of which are closely related to different industry projects. He is area or associate editor of 13 scientific journals, has frequently been a keynote or plenary speaker at international conferences, and was responsible for the organisation of the EURO 2009 conference in Bonn that attracted 2500 delegates. He is laureate, among others, of the prestigious Copernicus Award and the Science Award of the German Operations Research Society.

Katarzyna Anna Kuzmicz

Katarzyna A. Kuzmicz has got a Ph.D. from the University of Gdansk (Poland) and is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Management Engineering at Bialystok University of Technology in Poland. The context for her research in recent years has been concentrated on container transport in the Eurasian corridor as well as empty containers relocation and maintenance in sea ports. In recent years she has conducted research in cooperation with the Port of Hamburg and research teams from the University of Siegen and HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management in Germany. She gave presentations on these topics at international conferences in, among others, South Africa, China, Germany, Spain and Lithuania. She is a journal area editor for logistics and has been a director of an International Summer School of Logistics.