The Truck Routing and Aircraft Assignment Problem with Time Windows

Considering express services relying on point-to-point airfreight and ground networks, we introduce a two-echelon vehicle routing problem with capacity-matching constraints (2E-VRP-CM). The 2E-VRP-CM aims to determine aircraft flight legs and truck routes with overall minimized cost. In the 2E-VRP-CM, a heterogeneous fleet of trucks respond to customer requests. Cargoes are loaded onto assigned aircraft and transported between two airports. Once they reach the destination airport after the air transport, cargoes are assigned to trucks so as to reach the customer locations on time. At the airports, cargoes are transshipped between trucks and aircraft. The 2E-VRP-CM adopts capacity-matching constraints, and time window and synchronization constraints to model the routing problem of two-echelon networks. We develop the vehicle flow formulation and propose the random sequence algorithm followed by a variable neighborhood search. The computational experiments evaluate the effectiveness of the 2E-VRP-CM formulation and the applicability of the heuristic.