Urban Logistics Delivery Route Planning Based on A Single Metro Line

This paper proposed a framework to integrate metro for urban logistics delivery in order to avert the conflicts with ground transportation, reduce delivery cost, transport distance and delivery time of vehicles. Integrating metro-based Underground Logistics System (ULS) with ground delivery vehicles (GDVs), an urban logistics delivery path optimization model based on a single metro line was built to improve delivery efficiency. In handling this model, total transport cost was taken as the objective function by considering the capacity limitations of GDVs and soft customer time window (CTW), vehicle routing problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) was also taken into account. By means of the saving algorithm (CW algorithm) and the improved Tabu Search algorithm (CWTS), our established model was solved to optimize the delivery routes under metro-based ULS. Through the case analysis of a Logistics Transport Enterprise (LTE) in Nanjing, it was shown that our proposed algorithm consistently outperformed Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in taking less computation time and obtaining better results. Our proposed delivery mode also had a great advantage compared to the traditional truck delivery (TD) alone in terms of saving cost and guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS). The sensitivity analysis of the capacity offered an optimal GDV capacity setting to reduce total delivery cost.