Solving the assignment of customers to trucks and visiting days in a periodic routing real-world case

Abstract

Introduction: this work proposes a model, and two heuristic algorithms to assign customers to trucks and visiting days, as a first phase in the solution of a real-world routing problem, which is closely related to the Periodic vehicle routing problem, but a strategic decision of the company imposes the additional constraint that every customer must always be visited by the same truck. Methods: The proposed model aims to group the customers that are visited the same day by the same truck as close as possible. The first proposed heuristic has a constructive stage, and five underlying improvement heuristic, the second one uses an exact linear programming algorithm. Results: The algorithms are evaluated by instances taken from the literature and generated, taking into account the characteristics presented in the real-world case addressed.

A unified model framework for the multi-attribute consistent periodic vehicle routing problem

“…The authors used a set of artificial data constructed from real information provided by the brewing company. Related works adding the constraint of consistency of the drivers along the visits of the planning horizon can be found in [ 13 ] and [ 12 ]. Table 2 shows a summary of the features dealt in these works.…”

“…In [8] two approaches to the PVRP are distinguished depending on how the decisions are prioritized: Assignment routing problem if the selection of visit patterns is prioritized, and periodic routing problem when the construction of routes is prioritized. The first approach is applied to cases in which tactical decision prevails, as is the case of [2] and [13], while the second approach is specific to situations in which the interest lies in operational decisions.…”

“…A non-linear model was solved with a heuristic method that uses in one of its steps a well-known integer linear problem as a black box. In [ 13 ], a model and two heuristics are proposed to solve the ConPVRP just described.…”

“…A collection of vehicle routing problems in which consistency considerations are relevant are described in [11]. The consistent PVRP (ConPVRP) problem is referred with this name in [12] but it was previously addressed in [2,13]. The problem addressed in [2,13] is a consistent PVRP with time windows (ConPVRP-TW) where the model selects a pattern of visits to each customer, according to its frequency of visit, which depends on the customer's sales volume: weekly (the same day each week; e.g.…”