Solving the assignment of customers to trucks and visit days in a periodic routing real-world case1

Abstract

Introduction: This work proposes a model and two heuristic algorithms to assign customers to trucks and visit days as a first phase in the solution of a real-world routing problem, which is closely related to the PVRP (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 will group the customers that are visited the same day by the same truck as close as possible by means of centroid-based clustering. The first proposed heuristic has a constructive stage and three underlying improvement heuristics, while the second 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. © 2018, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. All rights reserved.