A decomposition approach for the periodic consistent vehicle routeing problem with an application in the cleaning sector

This study is inspired by a challenging logistic problem encountered in the cleaning service sector. The company wishes to solve the consistent vehicle routeing problem over a three-month planning horizon. The company has a heterogeneous vehicle fleet to guarantee multiple frequencies of visits to i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of production research 2023-11, Vol.61 (22), p.7727-7748
Main Authors: Messaoudi, Bilal, Oulamara, Ammar, Salhi, Said
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cleaning
Computer Science
Decomposition
Decomposition methods
driver consistency
Integer programming
large neighbourhood search
Logistics
mixed-integer linear programming
Operations Research
Optimization
Planning
Robustness (mathematics)
Routing
Vehicle routing
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Summary:This study is inspired by a challenging logistic problem encountered in the cleaning service sector. The company wishes to solve the consistent vehicle routeing problem over a three-month planning horizon. The company has a heterogeneous vehicle fleet to guarantee multiple frequencies of visits to its customers. The objective is to minimise the number of vehicles used and the total distance travelled. This problem is a generalisation of the periodic vehicle routeing problem. We decompose the problem into two sub-problems, namely, the planning and routeing optimisation sub-problems. We construct a mathematical model for the former and a large neighbourhood search for the latter. We evaluate the performance of our approach using the results of the industrial partner and instances from the literature on problems that are closely related to our case study. Our approach is found to be effective and robust. Our results outperform the existing company's plan in terms of solution quality, and staff convenience, and speed. We also discovered new best solutions on some of the instances from the literature.
ISSN:0020-7543
1366-588X
DOI:10.1080/00207543.2022.2162145