Research On Vehicle Routing Problem Considering Urgency Of Demand And Customer’s Tolerance

The rapid development of the Internet has promoted the reform of the logistics industry. As customer information and related data is mined by logistics enterprises, logistics enterprises has gradually paid more attention to providing corresponding logistics services for different customers to improve service quality and brand awareness, has gradually been attention. As the increase of LTL(Less-than-carload) logistics business, large quantities of freight have gradually changed into small batch, high frequency goods, and some goods are perishable and vulnerable, which relies on its distribution environment too much. How to divide customers into different types and optimize distribution plan considered these various requirements proposed by customers is one of problems to be solved for enterprises. How to make optimal price strategy while optimizing distribution plan in order to maximum their total profit is another difficult problem challenged to enterprises.To solve these problems, firstly, we proposed priority in view of the customer’s urgency for demand and tolerance for time, and then divided customers into different priority types. Secondly, we proposed a bi-objective vehicle routing problem with service priority considered goods protection, in which the minimum distribution cost and maximum satisfaction of customers are two objectives. To solve this model, a hybrid method based on multi-object genetic algorithm and path re-linking is designed, and an extensive computational experience is carried out to test the proposed method. Finally, we combined service pricing problem with vehicle routing problem, and proposed a single-objective mixed integer programming model, and then we designed a double-deck hybrid algorithm to solve this model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of algorithm, we made some simulation experiment. Through sensitivity analysis, we find that the optimal price and profit will decrease when customer are more sensitive to service price, while the optimal price and profit will increase when customer are more sensitive to service time. We also conclude that the total distribution cost will increase significantly when satisfaction level exceeds one specific threshold.