Hyper-heuristic algorithm for traffic flow-based vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup

To address the realistic problem of seriously reducing distribution efficiency and increasing distribution cost caused by road traffic congestion, this paper constructs a time-dependent speed describing vehicle travel speed and road traffic flow by simulating the change of urban traffic flow, to establish a vehicle route problem model considering traffic flow with distribution cost and customer satisfaction as optimization objectives. To solve this problem, a hyper-heuristic algorithm based on tabu search is designed in this paper, in which the underlying search operator is selected more efficiently by a high-level heuristic strategy. In addition, the correctness of the model and the effectiveness of the algorithm are verified by conducting simulation experiments on several benchmark sets. Experiment results are shown as the travel speed of the vehicle increases, the average customer satisfaction in lc1-type instances increases to 0.94. And the impact of urban traffic changes on logistics costs and customer satisfaction is further analyzed. Graphical Abstract Hyper-heuristic algorithm for traffic flow-based VRP with simultaneous delivery and pickup