Abstract
AbstractThis work tackles a rich vehicle routing problem (VRP) problem integrating a capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows (CVRPTW), and a service technician routing and scheduling problem (STRSP) for delivering various equipment based on customers' requests, and the subsequent installation by a number of technicians. The main objective is to reduce the overall costs of hired resources, and the total transportation costs of trucks/technicians. The problem was the topic of the fourth edition of the VeRoLog Solver Challenge in cooperation with the ORTEC company. Our contribution to research is the development of a mathematical model for this problem and a novel hyper‐heuristic algorithm to solve the problem based on a population of solutions. Experimental results on two datasets of small and real‐world size revealed the success of the hyper‐heuristic approach in finding optimal solutions in a shorter computational time, when compared to our exact model. The results of the large size dataset were also compared to the results of the eight finalists in the competition and were found to be competitive, proving the potential of our developed hyper‐heuristic framework.
Highlights
VeRoLog, the Euro Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics optimization, has been organizing challenges for the routing community, where each challenge aims to promote the design and development of an applicable and effective algorithm for a particular vehicle routing problem (VRP)
The run time for each instance in both datasets was calculated according to the competition rules, where it has been specified that each instance is run for a limited time on the user machine calculated with the formula: Tlimit = fb × (10+| R| ), where Tlimit is the time limit for running an instance according to the user local machine, fb is a factor calculated by a benchmark tool provided by the competition to estimate the equivalent time on any machine compared to the organizers core machine, and |R| is the number of delivery requests in the instance
The results of the hyper-heuristic experiments are reported in terms of the minimum and maximum objective values achieved in the nine runs, the average of the nine runs and the SD
Summary
VeRoLog, the Euro Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics optimization, has been organizing challenges for the routing community, where each challenge aims to promote the design and development of an applicable and effective algorithm for a particular vehicle routing problem (VRP). The third edition in 2017 was organized by ORTEC, one of the largest providers of advanced planning and optimization solutions and services They provided a real-world VRP problem involving the pickup and delivery of tools to measure milk quality at a number of farms, for a cattle improvement company. Wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/net a real-world problem of one of ORTEC’s clients This problem is about the delivery of equipment, such as vending machines, to satisfy customers’ requests, and the scheduling of a number of technicians each with a certain set of skills, who are required to install the equipment at least a day after the delivery. Many companies operating in the delivery and equipment installation businesses would benefit significantly from an effective and efficient solution to the proposed problem For such real-world complex problems, exact approaches, such as, mathematical programming often fail to provide solutions as the size of the instances get larger, and so heuristic-based search methods are preferred.
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