Shippers' collaboration in city logistics

To remain competitive, shippers must reduce their costs and in particular transportation costs. Collaborating between each other and grouping their demands may help to reach this goal. This can be addressed by solving pickup and delivery problems with multiple time windows (PDPMTW) with paired demands, where vehicles have to transport loads from pickup locations to delivery locations while respecting capacity and time constraints. This paper presents an exact model to solve a PDPTW with soft period and hard time windows. The objective is to minimize the total cost including transportation and penalty costs. The obtained results are encouraging for such problems in an urban context. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.