Graphical abstract Display Omitted Research highlights ► A more profitable collection is achieved by not collecting all the available cores. ► Vehicle routing problem with profits is considered for the case of multiple depots. ► Pricing issue is incorporated into the vehicle routing problem with profits.
Abstract Firms in the durable goods industry occasionally launch trade-in or buyback campaigns to induce replacement purchases by customers. As a result of this, used products (cores) quickly accumulate at the dealers during the campaign periods. We study the reverse logistics problem of such a firm that aims to collect cores from its dealers. Having already established a number of collection centers where inspection of the cores can be performed, the firm’s objective is to optimize the routes of a homogeneous fleet of capacitated vehicles each of which will depart from a collection center, visit a number of dealers to pick up cores, and return to the same center. We assume that dealers do not give their cores back free of charge, but they have a reservation price. Therefore, the cores accumulating at a dealer can only be taken back if the acquisition price announced by the firm exceeds the dealer’s reservation price. However, the firm is not obliged to visit all dealers; vehicles are dispatched to a dealer only if it is profitable to do so. The problem we focus on becomes an extension of the classical multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP) in which each visit to a dealer is associated with a gross profit and an acquisition price to be paid to take the cores back. We formulate two mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models for this problem which we refer to as the selective MDVRP with pricing. Since the problem is -hard, we propose a Tabu Search based heuristic method to solve medium and large-sized instances. The performance of the heuristic is quite promising in comparison with solving the MILP models by a state-of-the-art commercial solver.
Selective multi-depot vehicle routing problem with pricing
Tramsportation Research, Part C: Emerging Technologies ; 19 , 5 ; 866-884
2010-08-18
19 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Selective multi-depot vehicle routing problem with pricing
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