The Vehicle Routing Problem with Divisible Deliveries and Pickups

The vehicle routing problem with divisible deliveries and pickups is a new and interesting model within

reverse logistics. Each customer may have a pickup and delivery demand that have to be served with

capacitated vehicles. The pickup and the delivery quantities may be served, if beneficial, in two separate visits.

The model is placed in the context of other delivery and pickup problems and formulated as a mixed-integer

linear programming problem. In this paper, we study the savings that can be achieved by allowing the pickup

and delivery quantities to be served separately with respect to the case where the quantities have to be served

simultaneously. Both exact and heuristic results are analysed in depth for a better understanding of the problem

structure and an average estimation of the savings due to the possibility of serving pickup and delivery

quantities separately.