Routing strategies for integrating forward distribution and reverse collection

Due to the significant growth in the demand for logistics services and the ongoing trend towards the outsourcing of logistics activities, logistics service providers have concurrently gained a significant profit-making opportunity and faced the unprecedented challenge of surviving in the midst of increasingly fierce market competition. This research thus aims to propose routing strategies that optimally integrate forward distribution and reverse collection to help logistics service providers reduce their operating costs when providing transportation services, and thus improve their market competitive power. The integrated routing problem is formulated as the mixed pickup-delivery asymmetric traveling salesman path problem. The problem is NP-hard and new in the literature. Therefore, the objectives of this research are to first model the problem and then develop an efficient and effective heuristic solution algorithm to the problem. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2011) 62, 971–981. doi:10.1057/jors.2010.21 Published online 28 April 2010