Network Sharing Based Two-Tier Vehicle Routing Optimization of Urban Joint Distribution Under Online Shopping

The rapid development of online shopping offers new opportunities to the express delivery industry, but also brings enormous challenges due to its characteristics of multi-frequency and small-batch distribution. And the lack of cooperation among express companies in the urban distribution has resulted in uneconomical distribution. In the context of the sharing economy, this paper attempts to solve this problem by implementing joint distribution strategy with sharing the network resources. Based on the customer’s time window of receipt, a two-tier vehicle routing optimization model of urban joint distribution considering transfer stations’ sharing is established, and a hybrid heuristic algorithm has been designed accordingly. The results of a case study show significant optimization effect by comparing the independent distribution and joint distribution as well as robustness of the designed algorithm.