Abstract:

With the development of smart communities, the distribution of driverless vehicles in communities has become a focus of government, operators and researchers. The joint cooperation of storage points in communities is designed to balance the the distribution of each storage point and avoid the high input cost of driverless vehicles, which means that driverless vehicles can travel between different storage points. The driverless vehicle distribution problem proposed in this paper includes the unloading subproblem and the driverless vehicle scheduling subproblem. For the unloading subproblem, the unloading scheme of vehicles at storage points is optimized with the aim of minimizing the waiting time of vehicles, and the unloading efficiency of each storage point and the maximum waiting time of vehicles are considered. For the driverless vehicle scheduling subproblem, the driverless vehicles routes are optimized with the objective of minimum distribution cost, and the maximum loading of driverlessvehicles and customer demands are considered. The two-stage model and one two-stage variable neighborhood search heuristic algorithm are designed, in addition, embedding the van group membership method and the van group assignment method into this algorithm improves the efficiency of handling this problem. The validity of the model and the algorithm is ensured by examples. For the sensitivity analysis on the unloading efficiency at the storage points, the labor cost and the maximum loading of the driverless vehicles, the results show that improving the unloading efficiency of the storage points can significantly reduce the waiting time of the vehicles when the planning arrival time of external vehicles is relatively concentrated. The change of unit labor cost at some interval will make the driverless vehicle scheduling plan change, and excessive or low unit labor cost will not do so. Increasing the maximum loading of the driverless vehicles can only reduce the delivery cost to a limited extent.

Key words: distribution in communities, driverless vehicle distribution, cooperation of storage points, two-stage model, heuristic algorithm