Node location of bi-level urban metro-based ground-underground logistics distribution

Metro-based underground logistics (M-ULS) can relieve the pressure of urban traffic and avert the road congestion through coordinating with ground logistics system. A bi-level node location model is proposed based on the ground-underground logistics distribution mode. The cost of delivery and pickup from the perspective of service companies and customers are minimized as the upper and lower objectives. Since the model is belonged to NP-hard problem, the simulated annealing algorithm (SA algorithm) whose new solution generation part was improved according to the characteristics of the model is used to solve the problem. In the case analysis part, the distribution nodes and customer points close to Nanjing Metro Line 3 were selected to verify the validity of the model and algorithm. The result shows that the improved SA algorithm outperformed in taking less iteration times and obtaining better solutions. The total transportation cost of the system can be reduced by 21.7 % with the optimized node location plan, and 63.6 % of the ground transportation distance can be replaced by the underground transportation, such results are also obtained when the cargo demand increases by 1.5 times and 2 times, which verifies the advantages of M-ULS node location in reducing truck emission and total delivery cost.