The two-echelon vehicle routing problem with backhauls and capacitated satellites
Résumé
The present work aims to solve a 2-Echelon Multiple-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem jointly considering Capacitated Satellites and Reverse Flows (2E-MTVRP-CSRF). It fills two gaps in the two-echelon VRP literature: First, to the best of our knowledge, only inbound distributions activities were addressed in 2E-VRP. Second, the capacity at intermediate facilities (also called satellites) is generally considered either unbounded or null.We propose a decomposition-based matheuristic. It iteratively optimizes the first and the second echelon, by fixing the other echelon, and creates new complete solutions by solving a column-based MILP formulation with the set of generated trips. The optimization of each echelon is performed with tailored Small and Large Neighborhood Search heuristics.Our numerical experiments highlight that using medium-size satellites achieves a good trade-off between the routing cost and the cost of storage spaces in city-cores. In addition, we found that the integration of forward and backward flows in this type of setting reduces the routing costs by 34%.