We analyze a business model for e-supermarkets to enable multi-product sourcing capacity through co-opetition (collaborative competition). The logistics aspect of our approach is to design and execute a network system where ‘‘premium’’ goods are acquired from vendors at multiple locations in the supply network and delivered to customers. Our specific goals are to: (i) investigate the role of pr...

This contribution gives an introduction to an integrated vehicle routing and resource allocation problem. We refer to it as the Swap Trailer Problem and formulate the mathematical model. After the analysis of dynamic decision problems and the development of a framework for this problem, we highlight the dynamic aspect of the problem. Two different solution strategies are supposed. Special prope...

A multiobjective-model-based predictive control approach is proposed to solve a dynamic pickup and delivery problem in the context of a potential dial-a-ride service implementation. A dynamic objective function including two relevant dimensions, user and operator costs, is considered. Because these two components typically have opposing goals, the problem is formulated and solved using multiobj...

In this paper we consider a dynamic full truckload pickup and delivery problem with time-windows. Jobs arrive over time and are offered in a second-price auction. Individual vehicles bid on these jobs and maintain a schedule of the jobs they have won. We propose a pricing and scheduling strategy based on dynamic programming where not only the direct costs of a job insertion are taken into accou...

The problem of designing a set of routes with minimum cost to serve a collection of customers with a fleet of vehicles is a fundamental challenge, when the number of customers to be dropped or picked up is not known during the planning horizon. The purpose of this paper is to develop a vehicle routing Problem (VRP) model that addresses stochastic simultaneous pickup and delivery in the urban pu...

Communities of autonomous units are being developed for formal specification and semantic analysis of systems of interacting and mobile components. The autonomous units of a community are rulebased, self-controlled, goal-driven, and operate and move in a common environment. We employ communities of autonomous units to model the dynamic pickup and delivery problem with the general idea to demons...

In this paper, a special case of the vehicle routing problem in which the demands consist in a set of rectangular two-dimensional weighted items is considered. The vehicles have a two-dimensional loading surface and a maximum weight capacity. These problems have a routing and a packing component. A framework to handle the loading of a vehicle is proposed. A Constraint Programming loading model ...

The Traveling Salesman Problem with Pickup and Delivery (PDTSP) is considered. Seven perturbation heuristics are applied to instances ranging from 51 to 443 vertices. The main point of perturbation heuristics is to help a local search process to move away from a local optimum. The seven heuristics fall into three categories: Instance Perturbation (IP), Algorithmic Perturbation (AP), and Solutio...