A combined vehicle loading and routing problem: a case study of fuel logistics

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a model and solve a multi-compartment vehicle routing and loading problem with time windows (MCVRLP-TW). This problem originates from a real-life application arising in the fuel distribution, where a specific attention is paid to integrate the loading process in the routing problem. The main objective is to satisfy all petrol station demands at a minimal routing and service cost. For the MCVRLP-TW, we begin by describing the problem, providing its mathematical models and proposing an efficient tabu search to solve it. Within the framework of the tabu search, we introduce an efficient feature based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic to restrict the search process to a set of elite neighbouring solutions. We evaluate the performance of the approach by means of extensive numerical experiments. Furthermore, we analyse a real case under different datasets to demonstrate to our industrial partner the effectiveness of the proposed approach.