A Genetic Algorithm for the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery

This paper proposes and studies a novel two-echelon vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (2E-VRPSPD) which is applicable in logistics management nowadays. 2E-VRPSPD is a new variant of the traditional vehicle routing problem (VRP). We first present a mathematical programming model to the problem and then propose a heuristic algorithm approach, Genetic Algorithm (GA), to solve large instances of 2E-VRPSPD. The effectiveness of the GA is studied based on extensive computational experiments on generated instances.