The Line-haul Feeder Vehicle Routing Problem: Mathematical model formulation and heuristic approaches

This paper deals with a rather new version of the well known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) called the Line-haul Feeder Vehicle Routing Problem (LFVRP). It can be described as a VRP with synchronization constraints where two types of customers are served by two types of vehicles. These vehicles, contrary to the regular VRP, can meet and perform a transshipment to extend their travel. To achieve that, the vehicles need to synchronise - meaning that they have to be at the same place at the same time. The objective of the LFVRP is to minimize the total cost consisting of fixed vehicle cost as well as variable fuel and wage costs for drivers. For this problem we propose the first general mathematical model and derive two heuristics inspired by some structural insights about the problem. Using a thorough and comprehensive computational analysis we show the benefits of the LFVRP over simpler VRP variants, the quality of the heuristics compared with earlier work on the LFVRP and the relative performance of the two heuristics described as a function of different problem characteristics.