Management Information Systems Commons^™

An Empirical Study On The Benefit Of Split Loads With The Pickup And Delivery Problem, Maciek Nowak, Chelsea C. White, Ozlem Ergun

Information Systems and Operations Management: Faculty Publications & Other Works

Splitting loads such that the delivery of certain loads is completed in multiple trips rather than one trip has show to have benefit for both the classic Vehicle Routing Problem and the Pickup and Delivery Problem. However, the magnitude of the benefit may be affected by various problem characteristics. In this paper, we characterize those real world environments in which split loads are most likely to be beneficial. Based on practitioner interest, we determine how the benefit is affected by the mean load size and variance, number of origins relative to the number of destinations, the percentage of origin-destination pairs …