Considering autonomous delivery robots in urban logistics has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. In the meantime, new technology has led to new operational challenges, such as the routing and scheduling of vehicles and delivery robots together that are currently outside the logistics service providers’ capability. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem with time windows and delivery robots (VRPTWDR) as a variant of the classical VRP is studied. The investigated problem is concerned with the routing of a set of delivery vans equipped with a number of self-driving parcel delivery robots. To tackle the VRPTWDR, an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search heuristic algorithm is developed. Experiments show the performance and effectiveness of the algorithm for solving the VRPTWDR, and provide insights on the use of self-driving parcel delivery robots as an alternative last mile service.

考虑到城市物流中的自主交付机器人近年来引起了极大的关注。与此同时，新技术带来了新的运营挑战，例如车辆和送货机器人的路线安排和调度，这些目前超出了物流服务提供商的能力范围。在本文中，研究了作为经典 VRP 变体的具有时间窗口和送货机器人（VRPTWDR）的车辆路径问题。所研究的问题与一组配备了多个自动驾驶包裹递送机器人的送货车的路线有关。为了解决 VRPTWDR，开发了一种自适应大邻域搜索启发式算法。实验证明了该算法求解 VRPTWDR 的性能和有效性，