The Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem

•A Mathematical model for the Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (FPVRP) is proposed.•A Load-based formulation is developed to solve the FPVRP.•A set of several inequalities are proposed to reinforce the load-based FPVRP formulation.•A Load-based formulation for the Periodic Vehicle Routing P...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers & operations research Vol. 85; pp. 58 - 70
Main Authors: Archetti, Claudia, Fernández, Elena, Huerta-Muñoz, Diana L.
Format: Journal Article Publication
Language:English
Published: New York Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2017
Pergamon Press Inc
Subjects:
65 Numerical analysis
65K Mathematical programming, optimization and variational techniques
90 Operations research, mathematical programming
90C Mathematical programming
Anàlisi numèrica
Classificació AMS
Cost analysis
Customers
Delivery scheduling
Flexibility
Inequalities
Inventory Routing
Investigació operativa
Matemàtiques i estadística
Modelització matemàtica
Numerical analysis
Operations research
Periodic Vehicle Routing
Programació (Matemàtica)
Programming (Mathematics)
Route planning
Routing
Schedules
Service frequency
Traveling salesman problem
Vehicle routing
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
Periodic Vehicle Routing
Inventory Routing
Service frequency
Flexibility
ISSN:0305-0548, 1873-765X, 0305-0548
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•A Mathematical model for the Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (FPVRP) is proposed.•A Load-based formulation is developed to solve the FPVRP.•A set of several inequalities are proposed to reinforce the load-based FPVRP formulation.•A Load-based formulation for the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP) and a load-based formulation for the Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with InventoryConstraints (FPVRP-IC) are proposed for a fair comparison in the computational experience.•A computational experience was carried out in order to show that FPVRP formulation outperforms PVRP and FPVRP-IC formulations in terms of solution quality. [Display omitted] This paper introduces the Flexible Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (FPVRP) where a carrier has to establish a distribution plan to serve his customers over a planning horizon. Each customer has a total demand that must be served within the horizon and a limit on the maximum quantity that can be delivered at each visit. A fleet of homogeneous capacitated vehicles is available to perform the services and the objective is to minimize the total routing cost. The FPVRP can be seen as a generalization of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP) which instead has fixed service frequencies and schedules and where the quantity delivered at each visit is fixed. Moreover, the FPVRP shares some common characteristics with the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) where inventory levels are considered at each time period and, typically, an inventory cost is involved in the objective function. We present a worst-case analysis which shows the advantages of the FPVRP with respect to both PVRP and IRP. Moreover, we propose a mathematical formulation for the problem, together with some valid inequalities. Computational results show that adding flexibility improves meaningfully the routing costs in comparison with both PVRP and IRP.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:0305-0548
1873-765X
0305-0548
DOI:10.1016/j.cor.2017.03.008