MULTICRITERIA PICKUP AND DELIVERY PROBLEM WITH TRANSFER OPPORTUNITY

In this research, we develop a multiobjective vehicle routing and sche duling heuristic for a pickup and delivery problem. The problem contai ns time window, advanced request, multi-vehicle and many-to-many trans port. 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 propos e 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 ad opts the head/tail, head, and tail integration techniques; and (iii) i t allows interactivity. The procedure takes full advantage of due time and travel time information and is implemented through a computer pro gram. It is a one-phase heuristic that can be reiterated when necessar y. We provide detailed programming procedures and present the computat ional results of the proposed algorithm through the real data. Copyrig ht (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd