A meta-heuristic based multi-agent approach for last mile delivery problem

Abstract

e-Commerce has become a primary part of any country's economy, and seeking maximum efficiency and level of service is an essential concern for any corporation in order to stay in business. Logistics has a significant impact on the efficiency of online transactions, especially with the increasingly competitive domain with minimal profit margin-left. Thus, the collaboration between many logistics service providers (LSPs) at different levels has become a desirable approach to reduce the overall costs and increase the utilization level of their resources. In this work, we propose a domain-independent multi-agent framework that allows different LSPs to plan their operations jointly. The system considers the individual satisfaction of LSPs and their profits in an egalitarian manner while trying to achieve an overall benefit. We use different search strategies for every agent as the underlying solving method, and investigate to what level taking the personal interest of participants will affect the overall shared/ common goal. Copyright © 2020 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.