A vehicle routing problem with time windows for attended home distribution

Abstract

The reliable and efficient last three mile of delivery results in enormous challenges for city logistics. In recent years, the combination of telematics based big data collection and O2O e-commerce has built the ground for time-dependent vehicle routing, which becomes extremely important in the home delivery applications. This paper proposes a logistics platform to solve the order fulfillment problem of on-demand delivery service with large quantities of orders. The problem can be considered as a special vehicle routing problem with considering the link time and cost between the store and the delivery destinations designated by customers, who are associated with time windows and vehicles with capacity. We then propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is highly feasible and very potential in dealing with the present order fulfillment problem.