Nested Partitions Method For Mixed Disruption Events In Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

Logistics distribution vehicle routing problem with time windows belongs to a typical NP-Hard problem and is difficult to solve the optimal plan. Besides, in the midst of operation the logistics distribution system also suffers many unexpected disruptions such as vehicles damaged, traffic jam, the changes of customers'location, demand, service time window, new request by new customer and so on. Then if the vehicles still travel as its original plan, it will reduce the customers'satisfaction level and even lead to the failure of distribution task. Therefore, a rescue plan must be made quickly depending on the current state of the system to minimize the negative impact of disruptions on the whole work of the logistics scheduling under the premise of trade-off the benefits of all participants.This paper mainly researched vehicle routing problem with mixed disruption events based on the disruption management thought by turning mixed disruption events to new customer disruption event. And its objectives are to minimize the impact on the whole system and maximize the customers'satisfaction level. The main researches in this paper are as follows:(1)There are three types of disruption events divided by the disruption objective:vehicles, goods and customers; based on the analysis of the reason and the impact of the three disruption events types, turn the mixed disruption events to new customer disruption event.(2)Based on the disruption management thought, disruption of customers'dynamic requests are indentified; the method of disruptions measure which considers synthetically the customers, logistics service providers and drivers is presented. A disruption recovery model for the problem is put forward based on the disruption management optimal aim.(3) Supposing all vehicles start at the best-starting-time, three rescue strategies are proposed. They are adding vehicles policy, start later policy and short distance policy. To solve this multi-objective model, a nested partitions method is developed.(4)Computational experiments are carried out to examine the model and algorithm.The proposed disruption management model for vehicle routing problem with time windows can reduce the disturbance on the original plan and satisfy the customers'requests mostly. Moreover, the research provides references for other disruptions of logistics distribution in future.