Designing sustainable mid-haul logistics networks with intra-route multi-resource facilities

Location-routing problems (LRPs) with intra-route facilities have recently gained the attention of researchers and practitioners. Intra-route facilities are used in the context of city logistics or alternative fuel vehicle fleets to keep vehicles operational on routes. In this paper, we extend the LRP with intra-route facilities to handle so-called combined facilities at which different replenishment services are offered to visiting vehicles. We present an adaptive large neighborhood search which is enhanced by a lower bounding procedure that helps to efficiently explore promising facility configurations. We demonstrate the competitiveness of the algorithm on existing benchmark sets for the single-resource LRP with intra-route facilities. In addition, we design new benchmark sets to assess the impact of combined intra-route facilities in logistics networks. We find that combined facilities help to reduce both the overall costs of the operated logistics network and the fleet size.