Teilnahme an der VeRoLog 2025 in Trento

Vom 17. bis 19. Juni 2025 fand das 9. Treffen der EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization (VeRoLog 2025) an der Universität von Trento statt. Die Veranstaltung brachte Forscher und Industrieexperten aus ganz Europa und den USA zusammen, um aktuelle Themen im Bereich der Tourenplanung und Logistikoptimierung vorzustellen und zu diskutieren.

Unser Kollege Florian Linß war mit einem Vortrag im Rahmen des Streams "Rich VRP & industrial applications" vertreten und stellte ein gemeinsames Forschungsprojekt mit Felix Tamke und Leopold Kuttner vor. Die Arbeit konzentrierte sich auf Volumennutzungsstrategien für Tourenplanungsprobleme mit dreidimensionalen Beladebeschränkungen.

Volume utilization strategies in a matheuristic for solving vehicle routing problems with three-dimensional loading constraints

This work addresses the three-dimensional loading capacitated vehicle routing problem (3L-CVRP) with different loading variants. While vehicle routing problems with one-dimensional capacity constraints are already computationally challenging, incorporating three-dimensional loading feasibility adds another layer of complexity. Solution approaches for the 3L-CVRP often evaluate routes with high volume utilization. However, these densely packed loadings frequently violate practical constraints such as stability and LIFO accessibility, making them infeasible. To mitigate this issue and improve computational efficiency, limiting the usable volume heuristically can be beneficial. We develop a matheuristic that integrates these heuristic accelerations into a branch-and-cut algorithm. Our approach determines feasible loadings by combining an extreme point-based packing heuristic with a constraint programming (CP) model. While one-dimensional volume approximations alone are insufficient for guaranteeing feasibility, we explore how they can serve as a filter to constrain capacity effectively, bypassing the expensive calls of the loading heuristic and CP model without significantly compromising solution quality. Specifically, we investigate the effect of restricting volume utilization to a predefined threshold to eliminate the most likely infeasible solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of different 3L-CVRP variants on selecting a suitable volume utilization threshold.