Abstract
In this paper, we consider a challenging problem faced by a hygiene services company. The problem consists of planning and routing a set of customers over a 3-month horizon period where multiple frequencies of visits can be required simultaneously by each single customer. The objective is then threefold: (1) balancing workload between vehicles (agents) (2) minimizing number of visits to the same customer (3) minimizing total routing costs. In this context, a routing plan must be prepared for the whole horizon, taking into account all constraints of the problem. We model the problem using a decomposition approach of planning horizon, namely, weeks planning and days planning optimization. We propose an adaptive large neighborhood search with several operators for routing phase of solving approach. To evaluate the performance of the solving approach we solve an industrial instance with more than 6000 customers and 69951 requests of visits. The results show an excellent performance of the solving approach in terms of solution quality compared with the existing plan used by the hygiene services company.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Change history
04 November 2021
In the originally published version the indexes of some variables in Section 4.1, including Constraint (5) of the model, include a wrong offset of one position. Some errors occurred in notations of variable indexes in Constraint (5) conditions of the model in Section 4.1, together with some ambiguities that may lead to misunderstanding for the reader. This was corrected in the updated version.
References
Nuortio, T., Kytöjoki, J., Niska, H., Bräysy, O.: Improved route planning and scheduling of waste collection and transport. Expert Syst. Appl. 30(2), 223–232 (2006)
Matos, A.C., Oliveira, R.C.: An experimental study of the ant colony system for the period vehicle routing problem. In: Dorigo, M., Birattari, M., Blum, C., Gambardella, L.M., Mondada, F., Stützle, T. (eds.) ANTS 2004. LNCS, vol. 3172, pp. 286–293. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28646-2_26
Coene, S., Arnout, A., Spieksma, F.C.R.: On a periodic vehicle routing problem. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 61(12), 1719–1728 (2010)
Ronen, D., Goodhart, C.A.: Tactical store delivery planning. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 59(8), 1047–1054 (2008)
An, Y.J., Kim, Y.D., Jeong, B.J., Kim, S.D.: Scheduling healthcare services in a home healthcare system. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 63(11), 1589–1599 (2012)
Blakeley, F., Argüello, B., Cao, B., Hall, W., Knolmajer, J.: Optimizing periodic maintenance operations for Schindler elevator corporation. Interfaces 33(1), 67–79 (2003)
Campbell, A.M., Wilson, J.H.: Forty years of periodic vehicle routing. Networks 63(3), 276–276 (2014)
Beltrami, E.J., Bodin, L.D.: Networks and vehicle routing for municipal waste collection. Networks 4(1), 65–94 (1974)
Russell, R., Igo, W.: An assignment routing problem. Networks 9(1), 1–17 (1979)
Christofides, N., Beasley, J.E.: The period routing problem. Networks 14(2), 237–256 (1984)
Russell, R.A., Gribbin, D.: A multiphase approach to the period routing problem. Networks 21(7), 747–765 (1991)
Cordeau, J.F., Gendreau, M., Laporte, G.: A tabu search heuristic for periodic and multi-depot vehicle routing problems. Netw. Int. J. 30(2), 105–119 (1997)
Cordeau, J.F., Laporte, G., Mercier, A.: A unified tabu search heuristic for vehicle routing problems with time windows. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 52(8), 928–936 (2001)
Francis, P., Smilowitz, K., Tzur, M.: The period vehicle routing problem with service choice. Transp. Sci. 40(4), 439–454 (2006)
Alegre, J., Laguna, M., Pacheco, J.: Optimizing the periodic pick-up of raw materials for a manufacturer of auto parts. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 179(3), 736–746 (2007)
Mourgaya, M., Vanderbeck, F.: Column generation based heuristic for tactical planning in multi-period vehicle routing. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 183(3), 1028–1041 (2007)
Hemmelmayr, V.C., Doerner, K.F., Hartl, R.F.: A variable neighborhood search heuristic for periodic routing problems. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 195(3), 791–802 (2009)
Vidal, T., Crainic, T.G., Gendreau, M., Lahrichi, N., Rei, W.: A hybrid genetic algorithm for multidepot and periodic vehicle routing problems. Oper. Res. 60(3), 611–624 (2012)
Ropke, S., Pisinger, D.: An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Transp. Sci. 40(4), 455–472 (2006)
Ropke, S., Pisinger, D.: A unified heuristic for a large class of vehicle routing problems with backhauls. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 171(3), 750–775 (2006)
Bellmore, M., Nemhauser, G.L.: The traveling salesman problem: a survey. Oper. Res. 16(3), 538–558 (1968)
Lin, S., Kernighan, B.W.: An effective heuristic algorithm for the traveling-salesman problem. Oper. Res. 21(2), 498–516 (1973)
Google: Distance matrix API. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/start. Accessed 30 Oct 2018
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Messaoudi, B., Oulamara, A., Rahmani, N. (2019). Multiple Periods Vehicle Routing Problems: A Case Study. In: Liefooghe, A., Paquete, L. (eds) Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization. EvoCOP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16711-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16711-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16710-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16711-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)