An Integer Optimization Model for the Time Windows Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Delivery, Fleet, and Driver Scheduling

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem which describes a homogeneous set of vehicles and routes, in which each vehicle starts from a depot and traverses along a route in order to serve a set of customers with known geographical locations. If the delivery routes are constructed for period of time, the VRP is generalized as periodic VRP (PVRP). This paper develops a model for the optimal management of periodic deliveries of meals of a catering company. The PVRP incorporates time windows, deliveries, fleet and driver scheduling in the periodic planning.. The objective is to minimize the sum of the costs of travelling and elapsed time over the planning horizon. We model the problem as a linear mixed integer program and we propose a feasible neighbourhood direct search approach to solve the problem.