Cooperative Routing with Heterogeneous Vehicles

Cooperation among different vehicles is a promising application for Mobility as a Service (MaaS). A primary problem is optimizing the vehicle routes. In this paper, we propose a new concept, named delegation, where heterogeneous vehicles cooperate to reduce the total travel cost. Our study models a case in logistics, where a large truck for long-distance delivery carries small self-driving cargoes for the last mile delivery, and the travel cost of the small ones is discounted. We define an optimization problem enabling delegation, propose its integer programming (IP) instance, and discuss our concept through numerical experiments using a modern IP solver.