A pick-up and delivery problem for logistics e-marketplace services

In this paper we address a real industrial application involving a company that manages an e-marketplace for logistics services in the Italian territory. For the carriers, the main service offered by the company consists in the design of the optimal routes integrating additional delivery requests with those already in charge. The aim is to increase the profit exploiting the residual capacity of the vehicles. We model the problem as a multi-vehicle pick-up and delivery problem with mandatory customers. We test the proposed approach on some real instances provided by the company. The computational results confirm the efficacy of the approach in providing more profitable solutions.