Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Title	Three-Dimensional Container Loading and Vehicle Routing Problem with General Overlapping Service Regions
Year	2019
Degree	Master
School	Department of Transportation and Logistics Management College of Management National Chiao Tung University
Author	Bo-Yan Chou
Summary	This study investigates the Three-Dimensional Container Loading and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with general overlapping service regions, which is an extension of the three-dimensional capacitated vehicle routing problem (3L-CVRP). We are interested in solving the optimal decisions including the fleet deployment using the vehicles in the original region, the trans-regional vehicles and the vehicles from outsourcing, the corresponding vehicle routes for logistics companies to satisfy customers’ demand, and the three-dimensional container loading with pre-determined and overlapping service regions. We take a districting concept of “general overlapping service regions” (GOSR) into consideration in this study, which would increase the flexibility in vehicle routing and fleet deployment, and help reducing the operating cost of the distribution operations for logistics companies. We formulate a mathematical model following the scenario of the 3L-CVRP with overlapping service regions. It is well known that the conventional VRP is NP-hard. Since the concerned problem in this study is more complicated than the conventional VRP, it will be more difficult to solve. Consequently, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) as our solution approach. The data structure of chromosome encoding in our GA is not only comprehensive, but also easy to deal with the situation of GOSR and to understand cargo assignment and three-dimensional cargo loading situation. We randomly generate our instances in our numerical experiments by referring to the benchmark problems for the conventional VRP and 3L-CVRP, taking into account of the characteristics of GOSR. Our experimental results show that our proposed GA is able to obtain solutions with excellently quality effectively, and making use of GOSR may save significant distribution operating cost for logistics companies.
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