Research on location-routing problem of highway and high-speed railway multimodal transportation considering timeliness demand

Nowadays, highway and high-speed railway multimodal transportation can meet the customer demand for timely services, which is also the focus of logistics enterprises. Reasonable logistics nodes layout and routing optimization can help logistics organizations save costs and time. Therefore, this paper mainly discusses the location-routing problem of highway and high-speed railway multimodal transportation. Considering the time-sensitive nature of customer demand, the logistics services are divided into three types: arrival on the same day, arrival on the next morning and arrival on the next day, thereupon the penalty cost function for customer timeliness demand is designed, and then the Multi-Dot Location-Routing Problem with Time Window (MDLRPTW) model based on timeliness demand is constructed. Meanwhile, this model simultaneously determined quantities and locations of distribution centers, transportation modes and routes from logistics centers to distribution centers, quantities and locations of transportation mode conversion facilities and routes of products from the distribution centers to customer nodes. An integer linear programming is presented for the problem, and a genetic algorithm with a new chromosome structure proposed to solve the problem. Proposed chromosome structure consists of two different parts for multimodal transportation and location-routing parts of the model. Finally, simulation results show: the proposed method can provide reasonable suggestions for logistics enterprises to reduce the cost and improve service efficiency, furthermore, it also provides a theoretical reference for the practice of multimodal transportation location-route problem.