Freight Pickup and Delivery with Time Windows, Heterogeneous Fleet and Alternative Delivery Points

Abstract

Several alternatives to home delivery have recently appeared to give customers greater choice on where to securely pickup goods. Among them, the click-and-collect option has risen through the development of locker points for unattended goods pickup. Hence, transportation requests consist of picking up goods from a specific location and dropping them to one of the selected delivery locations. Also, transfer points allow the exchange of goods between heterogeneous vehicles. In this regard, we propose a novel three-index mixed-integer programming formulation of this problem. Experiments are performed on various instances to estimate the benefits of taking into account several transfer points and alternative delivery points instead of the traditional home delivery.