Geodesy

Algorithm

Engineering

Mile

Computer science

Pickup

Operations research

Upper and lower bounds

Mathematics

Geography

Image (mathematics)

Travelling salesman problem

2-opt

Mathematical analysis

Artificial intelligence

Heuristic

Last mile (transportation)

Competitive analysis

International Journal of Production Research

With the fast growth of the parcel volume of online shopping, home delivery (delivering parcels to customers’ homes or workplaces) has accentuated the pressure on last mile delivery actors. Customer pickup, which allows customers to pick up their parcels from shared delivery facilities near them, has become widely popular. This study introduces a novel travelling salesman problem with time windows for the last mile delivery in online shopping. The purpose is to find a minimum cost tour over given customers and/or shared delivery facilities (SDFs) in which unvisited customers are assigned to the SDFs. A general variable neighbourhood search heuristic is developed to solve the problem. Computational results corroborate that the proposed heuristic is competitive relative to well-known algorithms.

A traveling salesman problem with time windows for the last mile delivery in online shopping