Solving a 3-dimensional vehicle routing problem with delivery options in city logistics using fast-neighborhood based crowding differential evolution algorithm

Worldwide, most of the market sectors are experiencing rapid growth in online sales leading to incorporate various delivery options in the last-mile delivery. Last mile is the costliest segment in the supply chain and this stimulates delivery efficiency improvement. Emphasis is put on considering the vertical travel time taken by a delivery person to deliver the goods to the customers located in high rise buildings. Vertical travel time along with the time taken to travel in between the customer buildings and the service time are considered to estimate the exact time required in the entire delivery system. In this paper, a three dimensional vehicle routing problem is discussed and formulated to minimize the cost in last-mile networks. Hard time window constraints along with delivery options are considered in this paper to attain customer satisfaction. Finally, the computational experiments carried out show the superiority of our proposed fast-neighborhood based crowding differential evolution algorithm than with other algorithms. It was also found that comparatively fast niching helps in faster convergence even for large test instance.