Electric Vehicle Pickup-and-Delivery Problem with Soft Time Windows, Partial Charging, and Uncertain Travel Time

Electric vehicles (EVs) take advantage of reducing fossil-based environmental pollution and developing a more sustainable logistics network. Compared with internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), EVs have new technical characteristics like limited battery capacity and long charging time at charging stations. With the diffusion of EVs,...

Multi-agent Planning and Coordination for Automated Aircraft Ground Handling

Inspired by the vision of fully autonomous airside operations at Schiphol airport, this study aims to contribute to the short-term goal of automated aircraft ground handling. In this research, we design and evaluate a multi-agent system for planning of automated ground handling. There are two main components in the system, task allocation...

The ground handler dock capacitated pickup and delivery problem with time windows: A collaborative framework for air cargo operations

We study a typical problem within the air cargo supply chain, concerning the transportation of standard Unit Load Devices (ULDs) from freight forwarders’ to ground handlers’ warehouses. First, ULDs are picked up by a set of available trucks at the freight forwarders’ premises within a time window. Next, they are delivered to the ground handlers,...

An Auction-Based Multi-Agent System for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Autonomous Vehicles and Alternative Locations

The trends of autonomous transportation and mobility on demand in line with large numbers of requests increasingly call for decentralized vehicle routing optimization. Multi-agent systems (MASs) allow to model fully autonomous decentralized decision making, but are rarely considered in current decision support approaches. We propose a multi...

Solving Large-Scale Dynamic Collaborative Vehicle Routing Problems: An Auction-Based Multi-Agent Approach

The freight transportation sector is one of the major contributors to air pollution. An important way to reduce emissions consists of collective route planning. Although unloaded trips and inefficient routes could not always be prevented by individual carriers, more efficient operations could often be obtained if multiple carriers collaborate by...

The Clustered Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Multi Stack Side-Accessible Last-in First-out Loading: CPDPTW-SAL

This paper studies a variation of the pickup and delivery formulation with time windows which is applied to air cargo export operations. The formulation is extended using three factors. 1) Pickup nodes are positioned at freight forwarders. Delivery nodes are located at ground handlers. Trucks can only visit one freight forwarder. 2) Dock...

Decentralized Combinatorial Auctions for Dynamic and Large-Scale Collaborative Vehicle Routing

While collaborative vehicle routing has a significant potential to reduce transportation costs and emissions, current approaches are limited in terms of applicability, unrealistic assumptions, and low scalability. Centralized planning generally assumes full information and full control, which is often unacceptable for individual carriers....

The value of information sharing for platform-based collaborative vehicle routing

Cooperation is important in order to find efficient vehicle routing solutions for the growing transportation market. Increasingly, platforms emerge as facilitators for this kind of collaborative transportation. However, individual actors connected to a platform might refuse to share (parts of) their information due to reasons of competition....

Pickup and delivery problem with transshipment for inland waterway transport

Inland waterway transport is becoming attractive due to its minimum environmental impact in comparison with other transportation modes. Fixed timetables and routes are adopted by most barge operators, avoiding the full utilization of the available resources. Therefore a flexible model is adopted to reduce the transportation cost and...

Dynamic Distribution through the city of Amsterdam

This report explains the design choices, implementation and results of a software engineering project commissioned by MakeTek. The team was tasked with making a system that could solve bike delivery scheduling problems with limited bike carrying capacity, time windows, dynamic delivery additions, movable pickup points and delivery time estimates...