We propose a vehicle routing problem faced by companies that ship their goods from several production centers to multiple customers either directly or through a set of intermediate facilities where goods can be transshipped.
The main contribution of this work is the modeling and solving of a Pickup and Delivery variant of the VRP with Transshipment Facilities where transport is operated by several carriers proposing various transportation rates.
We define the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Transshipment Facilities (PDP-TF), propose a Large Neighborhood Search method to solve this problem and assess the performance of this method on a set of related optimization algorithms. Finally, we describe a real-life case study provided by a major food company in France.