  In this paper, we investigate vehicle routing problems with third-party
transshipment facilities that arise in the context of city logistics. Contrary
to classical vehicle routing problems, where each customer request is delivered
directly to its destination, the problems considered in this paper feature the
alternative possibility of delivering customer requests to third-party
transshipment facilities, such as urban consolidation centers, for a fee. We
present an adaptive large neighborhood search with an embedded random variable
neighborhood descent as a local search component and a set-partitioning problem
for the recombination of routes to solve various versions of the problem.
Thereby, we consider location-dependent time windows as well as heterogeneous
fleets and propose several new procedures that consider transshipment
facilities within the components of our adaptive large neighborhood search. The
proposed method is tested on benchmark instances from the literature as well as
newly created benchmark instances. It shows promising results, leading to
multiple improvements over existing algorithms from the literature. Moreover, a
real-world study is presented to gain managerial insights on the impact of
transshipment fees, order size, and heterogeneous fleets on the transshipment
decisions.
