Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Backhauling
Author(s): S. Salhi and G. Nagy
Source: The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 50, No. 10 (Oct., 1999), pp. 10341042
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals on behalf of the Operational Research Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3009928 .
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Introduction
The vehicle routing problem with backhauling (VRPB),
also called the backhaulingproblem, is an extension to the
classical vehicle routing problem (VRP). In this problem,
the vehicles are not only required to deliver goods to
customers,but also to pick up goods at customerlocations,
and bring them back to the depot. Customerswhose goods
are being picked up are also called backhauls.
Several researchers have made the assumption that
vehicles can only serve backhaul locations after they
have finished delivering all their load. One reason for this
is that it may be difficult to re-arrangegoods on the vehicle
and having both delivery and pickup goods may necessitate
this. Furthermore,accepting pickups before finishing all
deliveries results in a fluctuatingload. This may cause the
vehicle to be overloaded during its trip, resulting in an
infeasible vehicle tour. Although such an assumption
makes the implementation issue easier, in our view, it
may be possible to design vehicle routes which can be
practically feasible as well as more cost-effective if some
pickups are allowed to occur before all the deliveries are
completed.
If we do not make this assumption,then we can further
differentiate between two categories: simultaneous and
mixed backhaulingproblems.In the formercase, customers
may simultaneously send and receive goods. In the latter
case, customersare either delivery or pickup locations, but
not both. (The term 'mixed' denotes the fact that deliveries
andbackhaulsmay occur in any sequence on a vehicle tour.)
We note that mixed and simultaneousVRPB problems can
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eabc
Introduction
The insertion-basedmethods of Golden et a1 and of Casco
et a15 selects one backhaulat a time and hence such types of
search can be considered shortsighted.In other words, it
may be possible that because of early insertion of some
backhauls,some otherbackhaulscannotbe insertedcheaply
into a route. One possible way to remedy this problemis to
introduce flexibility in inserting customers in clusters not
necessarily of cardinalityone. We refer to this method as
cluster insertion. In the following, we first describe the
original 1-insertion method, then we provide the steps
needed to achieve cluster insertion.
Our implementationof the 1-insertionheuristic
This method is based on the load-basedinsertionprocedure
of Golden et al.4 Insertion-basedprocedurestreat linehaul
and backhaulcustomersseparately.Linehaulcustomersare
routedusing the heuristicdescribedin Salhi and Sari.2This
basically starts with a giant tour and then improves the
routes by a series of refinementsenhancedby useful reduction tests. The backhaulcustomersare then insertedinto the
linehaul routes one by one. For each backhaul c and each
route arc ab the insertioncost is defined as:
Wabc =dac
decreases.It is importantto note that the degree of arbitrariness for choosing P is much largerthan the one for R. The
choice of the R values can be based on the idea that
backhaulsmay be carriedto the depot by a common carrier.
The cost of doing this is proportionalto the distance of the
backhaul and the depot. This proportionis denoted by R,
and it can easily be observed that the value of R should lie
between 0 and 1.
We propose a more concise implementation for the
choice of P using the following observation.Note that all
terms of (1) are in distance units, while Lb is in units of
mass. Therefore,P should not be chosen to be unit-freebut
should incorporatea term (unit of distance/unitof mass).
One possible way of achieving this is to incorporatethe
ratio Tab/MQ into P, where Tab is the length of the tour
containing arc ab (Tab includes all backhauls already
inserted), and MQ is the maximum capacity constraint.
Therefore,we replace (1) in step 3 with:
+ dcb-dab-(1?
+R)
doc+P
Lb
(1)
= dac
dcb -dab-
a doc +?
.
* Lb(Tab/MQ)
(2)
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e 'e
(a)
method
Greedy
(b)
A possible
improvement
ft
dab + dcd -O
Lb(TablMQ)
(3)
insertion
cluster
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insertion. On the other hand, if we have, say, three backhauls, c, d and e and we know that the 2-insertioncosts for
each pair of them are better than the corresponding 1insertion costs then it may be worthwhile that the three of
them could be inserted together.
While it is possible to use specific clusteringmethods to
do this we have decided instead to build the clusters on the
basis of the results of the 2-insertion. Taking all backhauls
to be vertices in a graph we draw an edge between two
backhaulsif their simultaneousinsertionis betterthan their
separate insertion. This graph gives rise to two possible
methods of clustering.One way is to consider all groups of
backhaulswhich form a completegraphwhereasthe otheris
to allow all sets which form a connected graph.As completeness is a strongercriterionthan connectedness it can be
observed that the first case generates smaller clusters than
the second. In this study both scenarios are analysed.
To insert these clusters, we determinethe shortestpath
from vertex a in a delivery route to the neighbouringvertex
b such that the path traverses all points in the backhaul
cluster ft. The insertion cost for cluster ?ft into arc ab is
defined to be:
(Pt,
dab
*EiaI + /
Lb(Tab/MQ)
(4)
where E is the sum of pairwise distances between all
backhauls in the cluster and the depot, n is the numberof
backhaulsin Yt, and T(ft, ab) the length of the path from
a to b passing throughall points within this cluster.
The pseudo-code for this method, called LC-INS or SCINS depending on whether the clusters are formed by
connectedor complete graphsof backhauls,is given below:
Procedure LC-INS/SC-INS
Step 1. Solve the VRP for the linehaul customersonly.
Step 2. Find the backhaul with the least insertion cost
using (2).
Step 3. Find the pair of backhaulswith the least 2-insertion cost using (3).
Step 4. Create, using the outcomes of steps 2 and 3, all
possible clusters of backhauls.
Step 5. Find the backhaulcluster with the least insertion
cost using (4).
Step 6. Insertthe best individualbackhaulor the best pair
or the best cluster based on the lowest insertion
cost found in steps 2, 3 and 5.
Step 7. Delete the inserted backhaul(s) from the list of
backhauls.
Step 8. Repeat steps 2 to 7 until all backhaulsare inserted.
We note that the clusteringprocedurewe use in step 4 is
of complexity 0(b3) for both LC-INS and SC-INS. In step
5, less than b clusters may be inserted into less than (I + b)
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Computational
Data generation
We used the problems given by Christofides et at9 to
generate our single-depot data (50 to 199 customers) and
the ones given by Gillett and Johnsonl' for multi-depot data
(2 to 5 depots, 50 to 249 customers). There are 14 problems
in the first case and 11 in the second.
For the case of mixed pickups and deliveries we have
generated three VRPB problems for each VRP, declaring
every second, fourth or tenth customer on the list a backhaul and assigning it supply figure equal to the original
demand figure, in other words we let p(a) = q(a). For each
of the three classes the average results are computed and
Analysis of results
Solution quality
10% (T)
25% (Q)
50% (H)
Single-depot
(X)
simultaneous (Y)
average
10% (T)
25% (Q)
mixed
50% (H)
Multi-depot
(X)
ae
simultaneous
(Y)
mixed
average
I-INS
2-INS
SC-INS
LC-INS
1-INS
2-INS
SC-INS
LC-INS
1015
1040
1061
1101
1105
1064
2008
2052
2136
2237
2173
1014
1038
1052
1099
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1061
2008
2050
2112
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1034
1045
1096
1098
1057
2008
2054
2088
2230
2172
1011
1035
1047
1097
1093
1056
2008
2050
2099
2230
2160
2.5
2.8
3.1
3.9
3.9
3.2
9.0
7.6
10.7
18.5
11.9
2.6
2.9
3.3
4.3
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3.4
9.8
7.9
11.8
28.3
13.3
2.8
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3.6
4.9
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39.4
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39.4
14.9
2121
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11.5
14.2
17.4
17.5
Rows referto the averagesoverthe differentproblemsets. (T,Q,H) referto averagesover single depotproblems(14 in each case)
and multiple depot problems(11 in each case) when 10%,25% and 50% backhaulsare considered.'X' and 'FYreferto the two
sets of simultaneouspickup-and-deliveryproblems. Similarly the average values are recorded for single and multiple depot
problems.
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Conclusions
Appendix
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LC-ISN
GJ9T
4087/26/17.1
4087/26/17.1
4087/26/17.1
4087/26/17.1
GJ9Q
4087/26/19.2
4087/26/21.4
4136/26/27.8
4087/26/27.8
GJ9H
4136/28/18.0
4087/26/18.9
4087/26/19.8
4087/26/19.8
GJ9X
4426/26/74.8
4426/26/99.7
4426/26/150
4426/26/150
GJ9Y
4501/31/25.6
4501/31/27.8
4501/31/27.8
4501/31/27.8
1-INS
2-INS
SC-INS
LC-INS
GJ1OT
4002/26/31.3
4002/26/36.5
4002/26/36.5
4002/26/36.5
GJ1OQ
3931/28/17.0
3931/28/17.5
3931/28/18.4
3931/28/18.0
GJ1OH
4166/31/22.4
4166/31/24.6
4041/31/29.1
4166/31/29.1
GJ1OX
4446/31/78.3
4446/31/104
4446/31/157
4446/31/157
GJ1OY
4309/30/25.3
4309/30/30.1
4309/30/35.3
4183/29/35.9
1-INS
2-INS
SC-INS
LC-INS
GJ11T
3794/26/16.9
3794/26/20.6
3794/26/26.5
3794/26/26.6
GJ 1Q
3840/28/17.1
3840/28/17.6
3840/28/18.5
3840/28/18.0
GJ11H
4164/31/27.8
4039/29/32.7
3933/29/42.4
3933/29/43.6
GJ11X
4357/31/13.5
4357/31/36.0
4323/31/40.5
4323/31/40.5
GJ11Y
4357/31/36.0
4357/31/38.2
4357/31/40.5
4357/31/40.5
References
1 Laporte G (1992). The vehicle routing problem: an overview of
exact and approximate algorithms. Eur J Opl Res 59: 345-358..
2 Salhi S and Sari M (1997). A multi-level composite heuristic for
the multi-depot vehicle fleet mix problem. Eur J Opl Res 103:
95-112.
Vol.50,No.10
Society
Research
oftheOperational
1042 Journal
6 MosheiovG (1994). The travellingsalesmanproblemwith pickup and delivery.Eur J Opl Res 79: 299-310.
7 Min H, CurrentJ and Schilling D (1992). The multiple depot
vehicle routingproblemwith backhauling.JBus Log 13: 259288.
8 TothP and Vigo D (1996). A heuristicalgorithmfor the vehicle
routingproblemwith backhauls.In: Bianco L and TothP (eds).
Analysis. SpringerVerlag:
AdvancedMethodsin Transportation
Berlin, pp 585-608.
ReceivedJune 1998;
accepted June 1999 after one revision