A GRASPxILS for the Shared Customer Collaboration Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract Collaboration in transportation activities is becoming more and more important in urban last-mile logistics. This growing interest is not only motivated by transportation cost reduction and load capability improvements, but also by customer service level and stakeholder coordination enhancement. In this paper we tackle the Shared Customer Collaboration Vehicle Routing Problem (SCC-VRP) that arises in a collaborative last mile-delivery context where the coordination of different carriers is required. A hybridized GRASPxILS metaheuristic is proposed to solve the problem. Computational experiments are carried out on a standard benchmark as well as new instances derived from the literature. The results show that the hybrid metaheuristic provide good solutions in comparison with state of the art methods. The effect of the hybridization is also assessed in this study.