The bulk of it: Facilitating circularity via simultaneous pickup and delivery in furniture retailing

Furniture retailers increasingly engage in the circular economy because many old furniture pieces are suitable for recycling or even reuse, while customers greatly appreciate collection services, reducing friction when
purchasing new items. However, this poses particular challenges from a logistics perspective. First, customers often replace old furniture with new; hence, sales can be increased by offering collection services along with delivery. Second, because of the bulky nature of the merchandise, careful planning of deliveries and pickups is necessary because the vehicle capacity is easily exceeded. In this context, we present a novel multi-depot simultaneous pickup and delivery problem with time windows that considers selective pickups and seeks to minimize the lost rewards from failed pickups. We adopt a state-of-the-art routing solver from the literature for this problem to design both a heuristic that integrates route and collection planning and a decomposition heuristic that routes first and plans pickups second. In a computational study on instances from the literature and based on realistic data, we show that strictly minimizing tour length, as is common practice, can lead to a substantial amount of missed pickups. Moreover, we investigate the effects of time window management and fleet composition on reverse logistics efficiency. Finally, we discuss the environmental trade-off inherent in, on the one hand, collecting recyclable furniture and, on the other hand, increased transportation effort.

Link zum Paper:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.samod.2026.100054Externer Link