A recovery model for combinational disruptions in logistics delivery: Considering the real-world participators

The existence of uncertainties may result in various unexpected disruption events in logistics delivery, which often makes actual delivery operations deviate from intended plans. The purpose of the paper is to develop a combinational disruption recovery model for vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), trying to handle a variety and a combination of delivery disruption events. Firstly, a novel approach to measure new-adding customer disruption, which considers the real-world participators (mainly including customers, drivers and logistics providers) in VRPTW, is developed. Then the paper proposes methods of transforming various delivery disruptions into the new-adding customer disruption, and determines the optimal starting times of delivery vehicles from the depot to provide a new rescue strategy (called starting later policy) for disrupted VRPTW. Based on the above, a combinational disruption recovery model for VRPTW is constructed and nested partition method (NPM) is designed to solve the proposed model. Finally, computational results are reported and compared with those of previous works, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed solution and draws some interesting conclusions. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.