Delivering meals for multiple suppliers: Exclusive or sharing logistics service

Abstract We study a meal delivery problem faced by some logistics providers, which need to route vehicles in multiple trips to pick up meals from multiple suppliers and deliver to customers. Three types of logistics services are investigated: exclusive service and two novel sharing services. The delivery problems broadly belong to multi-trip routing with soft time windows and multiple refill locations. We develop two mainstream heuristics, iterated local search and adaptive large neighborhood search. Extensive case studies are conducted based on large-sized real-world instances. Managerial analysis shows that two sharing services generally yield much less total costs than the exclusive service.

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