Combining Vehicle Routing with Forwarding : Extension of the Vehicle Routing Problem by Different Types of Sub-contraction

The efficiency of transportation requests fulfillment can be increased through extending the problem of vehicle routing and scheduling by the possibility of subcontracting a part of the requests to external carriers. This problem extension transforms the usual vehicle routing and scheduling problems to the more general integrated operational transportation problems. In this contribution, we analyze the motivation, the chances, the realization, and the challenges of the integrated operational planning and report on experiments for extending the plain Vehicle Routing Problem to a corresponding problem combining vehicle routing and request forwarding by means of different sub–contraction types. The extended problem is formalized as a mixed integer linear programming model and solved by a commercial mathematical programming solver. The computational results show tremendous costs savings even for small problem instances by allowing subcontracting. Additionally, the performed experiments for the operational transportation planning are used for an analysis of the decision on the optimal fleet size for own vehicles and regularly hired vehicles.