Synchronized Multi-trip Multi-traffic Pickup & Delivery in City Logistics

The paper introduces the first methodology addressing with a single fleet of vehicles the routing of the three different types of transportation demands encountered in City Logistics, inbound, outbound and intra-city traffic. We propose a tabu search meta-heuristic calling on various neighbourhoods, dynamically selected, to provide an efficient search combining exploration and exploitation capabilities. The result analysis of extensive computational experiments qualify the impact of a number of major problem characteristics and search strategies on the quality of the meta-heuristic, the behaviour of the solutions, and the management of the City Logistics system.