Vehicle routing with roaming delivery locations

We propose the vehicle routing problem with roaming delivery locations (VRPRDL) to model an innovation in last-mile delivery where a customer's order is delivered to the trunk of his car. We develop construction and improvement heuristics for the VRPRDL based on two problem-specific techniques: (1) efficiently optimizing the delivery locations for a fixed customer delivery sequence and (2) efficiently switching a predecessor's or successor's delivery location during the insertion or deletion of a customer in a route. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive computation study to assess and quantify the benefits of trunk delivery in a variety of settings. The study reveals that a significant reduction in total distance travelled can be achieved, especially when trunk delivery is combined with traditional home delivery, which has both economic and environmental benefits. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.