Clustering heuristic for time-dependent periodic routing problems with complex constraints

Abstract

Periodic routing and scheduling is of utmost importance in many industries with mobile personnel working in the field: sales representatives, service technicians, suppliers, etc. The resulting optimization problems are of large scale and complexity, mostly due to discrete, combinatorial nature of the systems and due to complicated, nonuniform constraints. In many cases the long-term stability of the customer to personnel allocation is required, leading to the decomposition of the major problem into single employee subproblems.The paper deals with building clusters of customers visited by a single salesperson. The procedure takes into account diverse system requirements and constraints, possible traveling schedules and expected operational costs. The difficulty of the problem lies in its large scale and constraints complexity as well as in troublesome objective evaluation for the given solution. The general solution concept is presented. Its usefulness is supported by the results of the computational experiments.