Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Driver Consistency and service time optimization

Abstract

The Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Driver Consistency is an extension of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem in which routes for several vehicles have to be determined over a time horizon of several days. Each customer has an associated set of possible visit schedules and must be visited always by the same vehicle. In this paper, we study a variant of the PVRP-DC in which, in addition to routes and visit schedules, service times of customers have to be determined in order to maximize the utility of the service to the company. We call this problem the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Driver Consistency and Service Time Optimization. We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the problem, propose three branch-and-cut methods to solve it, two of which are based on Benders reformulations, and report computational results on benchmark instances with different features.