Attending the VeRoLog 2022 in Hamburg

© IM

From June 12 to 15, 2022, the 8th "Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization" (VeRoLog 2022) took place in Hamburg. Scientists and industry representatives from Europe and the USA met on the campus of the Kühne Logistics University to present and discuss current research topics in the field of route planning. Our colleague Florian Linß gave a presentation in the stream "Rich Vehicle Routing Problems" about the research project developed in cooperation with Leopold Kuttner and Felix Tamke on the topic of vehicle routing with integrated load planning.

Rich vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional loading constraints: a real-world application

We present a complex real-world vehicle routing problem with three-dimensional loading constraints. Among others, key features in the vehicle routing part include multiple time windows, forced and optional splitting, clustered pickup and delivery, and a limited heterogeneous vehicle pool as well as vertical stability, horizontal rotation, and LIFO constraints in the container loading subproblem. We propose an iterated local search metaheuristic with variable neighborhood descent. The loading subproblem is solved with an extreme-point based heuristic. According to the pack-first route-second approach, the loading length of orders is over-estimated in order to quickly identify feasible routes, which allows to bypass more expensive calls to the loading heuristic. The vehicle to route assignment is modeled as a minimum-weight maximum bipartite matching problem and solved by transforming it into a min-cost max-flow problem. The algorithm is tested on real-world instances from our industry partner in the corrugated package industry. We show that the proposed algorithm is well suited to support planners in their operational tasks.