Multi-depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Cooperative Transportation in Terminal Distribution

We design a method of cooperative transportation. In this method, the original scattered transportation resources from express distribution point to terminal distribution center are integrated through cooperative transportation. This is a multi-depot vehicle routing problem. Firstly, we transform it into a vehicle routing problem with single-depot, and the branch and bound (B&B) algorithm is improved to solve it. Next, we design greedy algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem with multi-depot, and get the approximate optimal solution. The B&B algorithm can get accurate results while the computing time of greedy algorithm is shorter. Directly solving the problem can retain the characteristics of the original problem, and the solution can reflect the actual situation better. The transformation reduces the complexity of the problem, but some feasible solutions may be lost.The experimental results show that the efficiency of transportation resource utilisation is improved after optimisation, which is helpful to make more economic transportation decisions.