A practical split vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery

We study a split vehicle routing problem (VRP) with simultaneous pickup and delivery. Our problem is motivated by the logistics operations practice of a third-party logistics provider (3PL) who serves the inbound logistics for an automobile manufacturing company. We develop several greedy algorithms and a competitive decision algorithm to solve the problem, and conduct computational experiments to investigate some managerial insights of the system. Our work provides useful guidance for the operations of the 3PL.