Logistics 4.0: A Matheuristics for the Integrated Vehicle Routing and Container Loading Problem

The increasing demand for freight transport requires logistic companies to improve their competitiveness by ensuring high service levels at limited costs. This paper investigates the problem of defining delivery plans with the aim to support logistic companies in reducing planning times and freight delivery costs. In delivery planning, given a set of delivery requests, both the routes and load configurations of Transport Units (TUs) are to be established. In the literature, this problem is defined as Three-dimensional Loading Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (3LCVRPTW). However, these problems are generally tackled separately and referred to as the vehicle routing problem and the container loading problem, respectively. Moreover, only a few contributions present solution approaches for real logistic systems, and these methods are mainly based on heuristics. In this work, we define a novel matheuristic algorithm for the integrated solution of the vehicle routing problem and container loading problem. The proposed method is suitable for real logistic applications and combines the advantages of exact solutions with the rapidity of heuristics. The approach aims at minimizing the total travel costs and the clients' time windows violations in the routes' definition, while optimizing the configuration of the cargo inside each TU. The developed matheuristic algorithm is tested both on a well-known literature benchmark and on a real dataset provided by the Italian company Elettric80. The obtained results show that the proposed method succeeds in determining in a short computational time both feasible routes and loading plans, minimizing the related costs while fulfilling logistics constraints.