Truck platooning, a linking technology of trucks on the highway, has gained enormous attention in recent years due to its benefits in energy and operation cost savings. However, most existing studies on truck platooning limit their focus on particular scenarios that each truck can serve only one customer demand and is thus with a specified origin–destination pair, so only routing and time schedules are taken into account. Nevertheless, in real-world logistics, each truck may need to serve multiple customers located at different places, and the operator managing a fleet of trucks thus has to determine not only the routing and time schedules of each truck but also the set of customers allocated to each truck and their sequence to visit. This is well known as a capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows (CVRPTW), and considering the application of truck platooning in such a problem entails new modeling frameworks and tailored solution algorithms. In light of this, this study makes the first attempt to optimize the truck platooning plan for a road-network CVRPTW in a way to minimize the total operation cost, including vehicles’ fixed dispatch cost and energy cost, while fulfilling all delivery demands within their time window constraints. Specifically, the operation plan will dictate the number of trucks to be dispatched, the set of customers, and the routing and time schedules for each truck. In addition, the modeling framework is constructed based on a road network instead of a traditional customer node graph to better resemble and facilitate the platooning operation. A 3-stage algorithm embedded with a ”route-then-schedule” scheme, Dynamic Programming, and Modified Insertion heuristic, is developed to solve the proposed model in a timely manner. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the proposed modeling framework, demonstrate the performance of the proposed solution algorithm, and quantify the benefit brought by the truck platooning technology.

中文翻译：

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针对路网有容量车辆路径问题的卡车列队规划


卡车列队行驶是高速公路上卡车的一种连接技术，由于其在能源和运营成本节约方面的优势，近年来受到了极大的关注。但是，大多数关于卡车列队行驶的现有研究都限制了他们对特定场景的关注，即每辆卡车只能满足一个客户需求，因此具有指定的起点-目的地对，因此仅考虑路径和时间表。然而，在现实世界的物流中，每辆卡车可能需要为位于不同地点的多个客户提供服务，因此管理卡车车队的操作员不仅必须确定每辆卡车的路线和时间表，还必须确定分配给每辆卡车的客户集及其访问顺序。这是众所周知的具有时间窗的有容量的车辆路径问题 （CVRPTW），考虑到在此类问题中应用卡车列队行驶需要新的建模框架和定制的求解算法。有鉴于此，本研究首次尝试优化道路网络 CVRPTW 的卡车列队行驶计划，以最大限度地降低总运营成本，包括车辆的固定调度成本和能源成本，同时满足其时间窗口限制内的所有交付需求。具体来说，运营计划将规定要调度的卡车数量、客户集以及每辆卡车的路线和时间表。此外，建模框架基于道路网络构建，而不是传统的客户节点图，以更好地模拟和促进列队行驶操作。开发了一种嵌入了“route-then-schedule”方案、动态规划和修改插入启发式的 3 阶段算法，以及时解决所提出的模型。 通过数值实验验证了所提出的建模框架，证明了所提出的求解算法的性能，并量化了卡车列队行驶技术带来的好处。