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Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2026, Vol. 34 ›› Issue (7): 189-205.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2024.1511

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Multi-center Close­Open Mixed Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window Assignment

Yong Wang1,2(), Tingting Shi1, Mengyuan Gou1, Qiong Jiang3, Maozeng Xu1   

  1. 1.School of Economics and Management,Chongqing Jiaotong University,Chongqing 400074,China
    2.Chongqing Key Laboratory of Green Logistics Intelligent Technology,Chongqing 400074,China
    3.School of Economics and Management,Changsha University of Science and Technology,Changsha 410114,China
  • Received:2024-09-03 Revised:2025-01-26 Online:2026-07-25 Published:2026-06-18
  • Contact: Yong Wang E-mail:yongwx@cqjtu.edu.cn

Abstract:

With the rapid development of the information technology and e-commerce industry, online shopping has become an important and indispensable part of residents’ daily lives. The full-time sale characteristic of online shopping platforms makes the logistics demand show a blowout growth, which leads to the prominent contradiction between limited logistics resources and the growing logistics demands, and puts forward higher requirements for the resource coordination and time urgency of the urban logistics system. Given the shortcomings of the multi-center vehicle routing problem with time windows in combining resource sharing and customer service time window violation avoidance, a transportation resource sharing strategy and a time window assignment strategy are proposed, and a multi-center close­open mixed vehicle routing problem with time window assignment is studied. First, combining the time window assignment strategy and the design of open-closed mixed vehicle routes, a bi-objective optimization model is established to minimize the total operating cost and the number of delivery vehicles. The total operating cost is composed of centralized transportation cost, vehicle maintenance cost, delivery cost, penalty cost for violating time windows, time window assignment cost, and incentive subsidy for distribution center collaboration. Second, an improved multi-objective particle swarm hybrid algorithm based on K-means clustering is proposed. The proposed hybrid algorithm divides the service periods according to the customer time window characteristics, and combines the scanning algorithm to improve the quality of the initial feasible solution. The external archive update mechanism is applied to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm, and the time window assignment strategy and transportation resource sharing strategy are integrated to improve the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm. Third, the proposed algorithm is compared with CPLEX solver, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-Ⅱ, the multi-objective ant colony algorithm, and the multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. Finally, combined with a multi-center logistics network in Chongqing City, China, a case study is explored on the multi-center close­open mixed vehicle routing problem with time window assignment, furthermore, the selection of relevant parameter values for the proposed algorithm is analyzed and discussed. The changes in related indicators such as delivery cost, transportation cost, total operating cost, and number of delivery vehicles are discussed under different combination modes of time window assignment, transportation resource sharing, and multi-center close­open mixed vehicle routing design. The research results show that the time window assignment strategy is conducive to reducing customer time window violations. For example, in the case study, the application of the time window assignment strategy resulted in a 47.5% reduction in the penalty cost and a 10.8% reduction in the total logistics operating cost, and the number of delivery vehicles decreased by 2.The transportation resource sharing strategy and open-closed mixed vehicle routing design help to achieve the reasonable allocation of logistics distribution resources, thereby effectively reducing the logistics operating cost of logistics enterprise and improving the resource allocation efficiency of multi-center logistics distribution networks. Therefore, the research is conducive to constructing a multi-center joint distribution system for urban logistics and can provide theoretical support and method reference for the research on multi-level multi-center logistics distribution network optimization problems.

Key words: multi-center close-open mixed vehicle routing problem, time window assignment, transportation resource sharing, improved multi-objective particle swarm algorithm, external archive update mechanism

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