Shipper collaboration with pickup and delivery requests in reverse logistics

In collaborative logistics, multiple shippers form an alliance to reduce empty back hauls and increase vehicle utilization rates. In this paper, we consider a shipper collaboration problem in reverse logistics, where each customer has both delivery and pickup requests.Each capacitated vehicle may pick up multiple products from multiple product depots and deliver them to multiple customers. The same vehicle may simultaneously pickup multiple used products from the customers and deliver them to multiple recycle depots. The problem is formulated as a collaborative pickup and delivery problem (CPDP). An iterative local search with variable neighborhood decent (ILS-VND) heuristic is proposed to solve this problem, and thirty randomly generated instances are tested to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the ILS-VND approach.