Abstract:To improve operational efficiency, e-commerce companies adopt a periodic delivery model to provide multiple periods of delivery to customers. In a multi periods environment, considering factors such as order splitting, flexible delivery, and heterogeneous vehicles, a mixed integer programming model is established to coordinate the arrangement of vehicle service routes, order splitting, and flexible delivery strategies, aiming to minimize the delivery cost for e-commerce companies. A hybrid taboo search algorithm was designed for solving the problem. Different scale instances are used to test the model and algorithm. The numerical experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm can obtain a satisfactory solution within a short period of time, indicating its effectiveness in solving the problem. By simultaneously considering order splitting and flexible delivery in the multi periods vehicle routing problem, the delivery cost can be effectively reduced and customer satisfaction can be enhanced.