The thesis deals with the planning of vehicle routes for transporting customer requests between pickup and delivery locations so that the cost of transportation is minimized. Instead of being shipped in a direct manner, the requests may be transported from the pickup location to one of the predefined transfer points, and later on, picked up at the transfer point in order to be moved to the final delivery destination. Generally, each request may be either transported directly or through one or more transfer points. Such consolidation of transportation requests may significantly influence the total cost.

The work is inspired by the real problems of the Wereldo company, which deals with solutions to such problems in practice. For the vehicle routing problems not taking into account transfer points, the company applies a complex solver based on adaptive large neighborhood search (Sassmann, 2021). The goal of the thesis is to propose and implement techniques exploiting the transfer points while utilizing the original solver. The computed solutions will be analyzed and compared to solutions without transfer points. A proper set of benchmark problems will be proposed to provide a sufficient analysis of the experimental results. Also, the data from a real-life problem provided by the Wereldo company will be considered in the final experiments.