Vehicle routing and scheduling problem with order acceptance for pharmaceutical refrigerated logistics

This paper studies a delivery problem in a pharmaceutical cold chain. In this problem, each customer orders multiple pharmaceutical products and requires a due date for each order. Each product has sensitive characteristics of storage temperature range and shelf life. A refrigerated vehicle routing and scheduling problem with order acceptance is formulated as a mixed-integer-linear-programming model. In the model, the acceptance of each pharmaceutical order and the route and schedule of a limited number of refrigerated vehicles is simultaneously determined to maximize the total profit. A hybrid genetic algorithm embedding an insertion heuristic with modification operation is proposed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and verified by comparing other metaheuristics. Managerial insights about various experimental environments for the order acceptance are suggested by conducting a sensitivity analysis.