Joint Vehicle Routing and Loading in Delivery Planning: A Stochastic Programming Approach

As the massive popularity of e-commerce has a great effect on business logistics, the Vehicle Routing and Loading Problem (VRLP) has been introduced to address package management and package delivery. With sophisticated package delivery to reach many customer destinations with high satisfaction, shipping and packing processes have to ensure that the packages will be delivered properly and safely. Most of the VRLPs have been studied under deterministic scenarios, assuming that all parameters are known. However, in reality, the customer demand is uncertain, and randomness in the VRLP has to be taken into consideration. Therefore, in this paper, we formulate the stochastic integer programming problem for planning package delivery. The goal is to help suppliers to minimize operating costs and to make the best decision for planning package delivery through item placement and truck routing assignment. We conducted an extensive performance evaluation to demonstrate flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution by using test data from benchmark datasets and real datasets of Singapore real road network and real services.