Abstract
Due to severe droughts occurring in southwest China, this region is facing a perilous water crisis for a long time. To meet the daily drinking water demand, the government is sending water to these rural areas via trucks. This study addresses a type of vehicle routing problem motivated by a drinking water distribution application in Luxi County, China to help alleviate the drought in this region. We model this problem as a mixed-integer program where the objective involves the minimisation of a weighted function of efficiency and equity metrics. Due to the computational complexity of the integer programming model, two heuristic approaches are proposed to obtain more practical solutions. We further propose Benders' decomposition algorithm and perform computational analysis to compare the efficiency of mixed integer programming model, heuristic approaches and Benders' decomposition algorithm. Through computational analyses, we also explore how different objective metrics influence the distribution of drinking water.
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