Our joint paper:

Adaptive large neighborhood search for the time-dependent profitable pickup and delivery problem with time windows

with Peng Sun, Mike Hewitt and Luuk Veelenturf is now published in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. It is available for download for free the coming 50 days.

For logistics service providers e-commerce brings both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, they face greater demands for their services from which they can generate revenues. On the other hand, these demands likely involve narrow delivery time windows, which generally lower vehicle utilization and increase transportation costs.

We study an optimization problem for coordinating those operations: the time-dependent profitable pickup and delivery problem with time windows. In this problem, the logistics provider has the opportunity to use its fleet of capacitated vehicles to transport shipment requests, for a profit, from pickup to delivery locations. Due to demographic and market trends, we focus on an urban setting, wherein road congestion is a factor. As a result, the problem explicitly recognizes that travel times may be time-dependent. The logistics provider seeks to maximize its profits from serving transportation requests, which we compute as the difference between the profits associated with transported requests and transportation costs.