Failure-specific cooperative recourse strategy for simultaneous pickup and delivery problem with stochastic demands

This paper concerns the generation of a priori routes for a fleet of vehicles that pick up and deliver items with stochastic demands. A failure-specific cooperative recourse strategy is proposed to explore a risk pooling mechanism for routing in the context of simultaneous pickup and delivery with stochastic demands. By defining complete failure and semi-failure of routing, the travelling cost under our failure-specific cooperative strategy is estimated. Also, an adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm is developed. Compared with a strategy that involves no cooperation between vehicles, our strategy performs better in terms of reducing travelling costs, and balancing fleet size and detour frequency. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.