Heterogeneous truck routing policies with tour routing time restriction

We study a heterogeneous full-truckload vehicle routing problem based on the case of a trucking company in Malaysia, where trucks originate from a depot and are dispatched to various parts of the service area. Each order defines an origin-destination pair for pickup and delivery locations. Goods have to be picked up or delivered within the pre-specified pickup and delivery time windows. Besides, we consider a restriction on tour routing time, i.e. the total time taken from the time each truck leaves the depot, servicing a number of orders, to the time it returns to the depot. Our objective is to minimize total deadhead costs. Four integer programming solution policies are proposed. Three of the policies identify the set of homebound trucks before assigning jobs to trucks, while the last policy is a one-off algorithm that assigns job routes to all the trucks and makes sure that each truck will not exceed the total route time limit when it returns to the depot. Crosssectional computation results show that the one-off policy is the best amongst the four. Cumulative analysis results show that all four policies do better than the company’s original assignment in terms of deadhead costs and truck utilization