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Abstract In this paper, we propose a mathematical model and an adaptive large neighborhood search to solve a two-tiered transportation problem. This problem arises in a prospective study that aims at designing an innovative distribution system for goods in congested city cores. In the first tier, goods are transported in city buses from a consolidation and distribution center to a set of bus stops. The main idea is to use the buses spare capacity to drive the goods to the city core. In the second tier, final customers are distributed by a fleet of near-zero emissions city freighters. This system requires transferring the goods from buses to city freighters at the bus stops. We model the corresponding optimization problem as a variant of the pickup and delivery problem with transfers and solve it with an adaptive large neighborhood search. To evaluate its results, lower bounds are calculated with a column generation approach. The algorithm is assessed on data sets derived from a field study in the medium-sized city of La Rochelle in France.
Masson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.