A multi-compartment vehicle routing problem arising in the collection of olive oil in Tunisia

Abstract

We introduce, model and solve to optimality a rich multi-product, multi-period and multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with a required compartment cleaning activity. This real-life application arises in the olive oil collection process in Tunisia, where regional collection offices dispose of a fleet of vehicles to collect one or several grades of olive oil from a set of producers. For each grade, the quantity offered by a producer changes dynamically over the planning horizon. We first provide a mathematical formulation of the problem, along with a set of known and new valid inequalities. We then propose an exact branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the problem. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm on real data sets under different transportation scenarios to demonstrate to our industrial partner the advantages of using multi-compartment vehicles.