GRASP‐based request allocation and MDP‐based vehicle routing in home pick‐up service with service continuity consideration

Abstract

AbstractService continuity (SC) plays an important role in service industry. In this paper, a daily home parcel pick‐up scheduling and routing problem is studied with SC consideration. In this context, a fixed group of couriers is assigned to provide services exclusively within a specific region. Each day, customers within this region either have pre‐scheduled services in advance or stochastically make service requests during the couriers' shifts. Pre‐scheduled service request can be serviced by any courier serving the region, while stochastic service request can only be serviced by the courier most familiar with the corresponding customer. Consequently, the study problem is divided into two distinct sub‐problems: (i) the allocation of pre‐scheduled requests to couriers before their tours start and (ii) routing each courier independently to service both its allocated customers and its potential stochastic customers. The sub‐problem (ii) is formulated as a Markov decision process and an existing dynamic programming method is applied to solve it exactly. For the sub‐problem (i), Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure‐based meta‐heuristics is proposed. Finally, these meta‐heuristics are evaluated through computational experiments, yielding valuable application insights.