A Multi-compartment Vehicle Routing Problem for Livestock Feed Distribution

Abstract

In the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), customer demands from one or more depots are to be distributed via a fleet of vehicles. Various objectives of the problem are considered in literature, including minimization of the total distance/time traversed by the fleet during distribution, the total cost of vehicle usage, or minimizing the maximum tour length/time. In this study, we consider a multi-compartment VRP with incompatible products for the daily solution of a livestock feed distribution network, where each livestock farm requests one type of feed from a single depot, and the vehicles have several compartments. The objective is to minimize the total cost of distribution. Although VRP is a well-studied problem in literature, multi-compartment VRP is considered only by few authors, and our problem differs from the existing ones due to special operational constraints imposed by the situation on hand. We formulate a basic mathematical model for the problem and present possible extensions. We design a computational experiment for testing the effects of uncontrollable parameters over model performance on a commercial solver and report the results. The proposed model can easily be adapted to other distribution networks such as food and fuel/chemicals.