EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1797. A priori route planning for attended home delivery with subscription and ad-hoc customers

Invited abstract in session WB-56: Heuristics for Vehicle Routing 2, stream Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Liberty 1.11

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Niels Wouda
Technology and Operations Management, Rotterdam School of Management
2. Lucas Veelenturf
Department of Technology & Operations Management, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
3. Niels Agatz
Decision and Information Science, RSM University

Abstract

We consider a setting in which a service provider offers specific (engineering) services at customer locations. The service provider offers these services both on a subscription and ad-hoc basis. Subscription-based customers are known to the provider and can be planned ahead of time. Customers with a subscription need to be offered at least two time slots on different days, from which they are free to choose one. Ad-hoc customers arrive dynamically over time and are offered time slots that are a good-enough fit. We propose a planning model that generates efficient a-priori routes for subscription-based customers by explicitly taking into account random customer choices from the offered time slots. The planning leaves sufficient slack to accommodate ad-hoc customers. We develop an exact method based on branch-and-price for the route planning problem, as well as a fast metaheuristic for practically-sized instances. We compare the performance of both methods on numerical benchmark instances, and also consider a case study using real-world data from an industry partner offering a tyre-changing service.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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