Multicriteria pickup and delivery problem with transfer opportunity

In this research, we develop a multiobjective vehicle routing and scheduling heuristic for a pickup and delivery problem. The problem contains time window, advanced request, multi-vehicle and many-to-many transport. In addition, the fleet size is not predetermined, and customers are allowed to transfer between vehicles. The objectives of scheduling are to minimize vehicle expense, tardiness and travel time. We propose a concurrent scheduling approach, which allocates customers to more than one vehicle and assigns more than one customer to a vehicle at a time. It differs from the usual concurrent approach in three aspects: (i) it uses the look-ahead strategy to construct miniroute; (ii) it adopts the head/tail, head, and tail integration techniques; and (iii) it allows interactivity. The procedure takes full advantage of due time and travel time information and is implemented through a computer program. It is a one-phase heuristic that can be reiterated when necessary. We provide detailed programming procedures and present the computational results of the proposed algorithm through the real data.