A Disruption Recovery Model for Time-Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows in Delivering Perishable Goods

In delivering perishable goods, certain unexpected disruptive events may cause the initial routing scheme to be infeasible. A new routing scheme must be generated quickly to alleviate delivery disturbances. According to the idea of disruption management, a disruption recovery model with a distinctive type of split delivery is developed for inter-route recourse based on an initial time-dependent vehicle routing model with time windows, which synthesizes the perishable nature of delivered goods and dynamic travel route choice in urban road networks. Then, a tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve the initial routing problem and further extended to generate the disruption recovery plan. Three computational experiments on the instances adapted from Solomon's and Gehring and Homberger's benchmark problems are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. Supplementary data associated with this article can be found at https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/foL0Vfo5C0GUjTrdO2UwljhZ9j6nNnHcD2Q0bKCTXJS.