Territory Design for Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complex problem of designing contiguous delivery territories over multiple periods with dynamic customer demands and time windows, using a MILP model and a heuristic to find high-quality solutions efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formulation and heuristic for the dynamic multi-period vehicle routing problem with time windows, tailored for real-world food distribution scenarios.

Findings

Heuristic solutions are comparable to MILP solutions on small instances.

Proposed methods produce high-quality solutions within reasonable computational times.

Application to real-world data demonstrates practical effectiveness.

Abstract

This study introduces the Territory Design for Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (TD-DMPVRPTW), motivated by a real-world application at a food company's distribution center. This problem deals with the design of contiguous and compact territories for delivery of orders from a depot to a set of customers, with time windows, over a multi-period planning horizon. Customers and their demands vary dynamically over time. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and solved by a proposed heuristic. The heuristic solutions are compared with the proposed MILP solutions on a set of small artificial instances and the food company's solutions on a set of real-world instances. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm can yield high-quality solutions within moderate running times.